A small, nondescript village in Bihar may have found a way to ameliorate the appalling slaughter of baby girls while tackling global warming and climate change at the same time with a simple solution that incorporates tradition as well as knowledge of farming.

A newborn girl is brought to a ward from the operation theater at a government hospital in Morena in the Central Indian State of Madhya Pradesh. The starving girls point to a painful reality revealed in India's most recent census: Despite a booming economy and big cities full of glittering malls and luxury cars, the country is failing its girls. Early results show India has only 914 girls under age 6 for every 1,000 boys. The census in Morena showed that for every 1,000 boys only 825 girls in the district made it to their sixth birthdays, down from an already troubling 829 a decade ago. Pic: AP

The flood-ravaged districts of eastern Bihar, one of India’s most poverty-stricken states, present a scenario of abject poverty and poor development. If the rest of India were any gauge, their daughters should be missing. According to a recent report by Unicef, as many as 50 million girls and women are missing from India’s population because of systematic gender discrimination. There are fewer than 93 women in India for every 100 men in the population, against 105 female births for every 100 males across the rest of the world. Many of India’s girls, between birth and the age of 5, are killed. The UN estimates that 2,000 girls are aborted every day in India.
But the village, Dharhara. is an exception. Some 20 kilometers from the district headquarters of Bhagalpur, the village is one of the greenest pockets of the region. That is due in part to the fact that for years girls have been welcomed into the world with the local community planting at least 10 fruit trees, traditionally mangoes, in celebration. New daughters here are treated as avatars of the Goddess Lakshmi and stand to inherit these fruit trees as they grow up.

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In Malaysia, the international television news you watch may not be the same television news watched across the rest of the world. It appears that the major broadcast networks beamed into the country including BBC, CNBC, Australian Broadcasting, Al Jazeera and other international news feeds are put on a five-minute tape delay while electronic devices scan the broadcasts for objectionable keywords, including the name of the opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim.

'Anwar Ibrahim', an objectionable keyword. Pic: AP.

The censoring of news came to public notice during the April 28 Bersih 3.0 rally to protest what the NGO claims are Malaysia’s unfair election laws. When violence broke out, Al Jazeera reporter Harry Fawcett attempted to film police beating protesters into the ground. However, Fawcett was roughed up and his own camera was pushed to the ground. When the episode was shown on the Al Jazeera broadcast that night, an Al Jazeera spokesman said the police violence had been excised in Malaysia. It appears that similar BBC film was also edited to remove police beatings, other sources say.

All of the major news feeds are routed through Astro, the Malaysian direct broadcast satellite pay television service, which is owned and operated by Measat Broadcast Network Systems, which in turn is wholly owned by a subsidiary of Astro Holdings Sdn Bhd, controlled by Malaysia’s richest man, the reclusive businessman Tatparanandam Ananda Krishnan, a longtime friend and close associate of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad as well as a long string of UMNO cronies.

According to a former Astro employee, the television news feeds are routed through a small room in the Astro headquarters, where electronic devices search the broadcasts for keywords that may be objectionable to government officials. The censorship section is headed by a “news controller” named Vincent de Paul, Asia Sentinel was told. Repeated calls to the Astro office in Kuala Lumpur, including attempts to speak with de Paul, were unsuccessful.

Malaysia’s mainstream media are all controlled by the country’s major political parties and all are closely monitored to present the most favorable possible view of the political situation to readers and viewers of local television stations. It had been assumed, however, that the international news from satellite channels had remained uncensored.

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The majority of Hong Kong’s 7.1 million people were happy that Leung Chun-ying won the small-circle competition to become the territory’s next chief executive against a clearly incompetent opponent. But as July 1 approaches – the date for his installation in power — worries are mounting about what he stands for and whether he is more than just a smart, well-programmed Beijing apparatchik.

Hong Kong's Chief Eexecutive elect Leung Chun-ying. Pic: AP.

For sure, CY, as he is generally known, is getting a good press for his promise of quick action to increase housing and land supply and in particular to increase production of public rental housing. The latter is urgently needed as high private-sector prices, themselves partly the result of minimal supply and developer land-hoarding, have forced many households to abandon any idea of ownership and to look to the low-cost, public rental sector. There is also a huge need for cheap accommodation for the rapidly growing number of old people currently living in dismal circumstances such as cage homes.

Leung also looks set to move for quick action on other issues of public concern such as pollution, to which the current administration of Donald Tsang has devoted much talk and precious little action. Hopes are high that Leung’s political appointees will be able to take decisions and ensure that they are implemented. Daily public appearances and speeches have given the impression of Leung as a hands-on leader at ease with the public and ready to press the flesh in markets and housing estates.

However, another side to his personality is also coming to the fore, which is likely to become a matter of contention. He has not only proposed a major reorganization of the government but insisted that it be in place very soon – preferably before he takes office and certainly before the current Legislative Council session ends in late July. With legislative elections due in September, the new legislature will not meet till after that.

Leung is presenting the changes as a necessary part of pushing for more pro-active government. However, critics reasonably ask whether enough thought and discussion has gone into the proposals. There is even a question of whether Leung himself initiated them or they were handed down to him by Beijing string-pullers. The fact is that Leung has no experience of government, no experience of the civil service and no experience of being popularly elected.

The proposals are supposed to speed decision-making by creating two new senior political posts of deputy chief secretary and deputy financial secretary. Some bureaus would report directly to either the Chief Secretary or Financial Secretary, others (including education) only to their deputies. The proposals involve a total of some 50 new posts costing HK$72 million a year. Whether this extra layer of political appointees and decision makers would speed decision-making is questionable, as is the political motivation behind it.

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Nunun Nubaeti, the key witness in an Indonesian bribery case that has seen 28 lawmakers jailed so far, was handed a two-and-a-half year jail sentence and a fine equivalent to US$16,350, both characterized as a slap on the wrist, in a Jakarta Anti-Corruption Court session yesterday.

Nunun Nibaeti. Pic: Asia Sentinel.

Nunun immediately asked to be taken to a hospital, saying she was “shocked and sickened.” The case in which Nunun, a prominent Jakarta socialite and wife of a national deputy police chief, was jailed is significant in that the individual who gave her a bagful of 480 travelers’ checks to be delivered to the jailed lawmakers, has never been identified. It is also significant because Nunun led authorities on a multi-country chase after having fled the country for Singapore to avoid arrest, claiming she had to seek medical treatment for a strange malady that made her forget everything.

The anti-corruption judges ruled that Nunun had channeled Rp20.8 billion (US$2.26 million) worth of checks in bribes to lawmakers to support the election of Miranda Swaray Goeltom as the senior deputy governor of Bank Indonesia. Goeltom was recently named as a suspect in the case.

What nobody seems to want to ask is why the unnamed parties wanted Goeltom reappointed so fervently. The travelers’ checks were purchased by a company called First Mujur, a palm oil company, from Artha Graha Bank. Both First Mujur and Artha Graha are subsidiaries of the Artha Graha Group, owned by a Sumatran businessman named Tommy Winata. The checks, according to testimony, were delivered in paper sacks to some lawmakers, color-coded envelopes to others. Officials from First Mujur told officials of Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) they had no idea how the checks had ended up the hands of the lawmakers.

They had been purchased to finance a palm oil plantation project, they said. Although the names of the bank and the palm oil company have been made public, Winata’s name was never mentioned in the trial, and it is unlikely that it ever will be. He is considered too powerful to mess with.

Nunun was on the run for almost two years. At one point she was thought to be in Cambodia although no one was sure. Busyro Mugoddas, the chairman of the KPK, said last October charged that “large powers” have prevented his organization, perhaps the country’s most incorruptible, from tracking the woman down.

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Hong Kong’s overcrowded Central district is awash in some of the priciest stores in the world, occupying rental space that costs – in the case of Abercrombie & Fitch in the historic Pedder Building on Pedder Street between Queen’s Road and De Voeux Road – a whopping US$1 million per month in rent.

The Louis Vuitton store in Hong Kong Pic: AP

Not far away, Burberry is paying the equivalent of US850,000 per month according to Bloomberg. Directly across the street from Abercrombie & Fitch, the northwest corner of the Landmark building is fitted out to look like a gigantic Louis Vuitton gift box, paying somewhere near the same amount. A rush of redecoration has left seemingly half the first-floor corners of Central done up to look like gaudy gift boxes, in fact.

Louis Vuitton and others can afford this kind of rent because inside the two-level store, stylishly-dressed saleswomen are selling US$1,000 bags faster than the Watson’s health and beauty store nearby can sell toothbrushes. There are times when the luxury stores have to meter the customers to keep them from overwhelming the staff.

The reason, as everybody knows, is the flood of nouveaux-riches Chinese swarming over the border as a result of the Individual Visit Scheme instituted in 2003 and which was responsible for the arrival of more than 22.5 million Chinese visitors in 2010. Mainland Chinese visitors accounted for 67 percent of retail sales, up 26 percent from 2010 in the first eight months of 2011, according to Bloomberg, and represented the largest group of spenders.

It is hardly news that luxury spending in China has been spiraling upwards for nearly two decades. But just how steep the spiral has been is detailed in a new report by the Beijing office of the Seoul-based Samsung Economic Research Institute. Chinese consumers now constitute one of the world’s largest such markets, spending US$10.7 billion in the domestic market and US$50 billion overseas – the reason Hong Kong’s retailers can pay such gigantic rents.

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Thailand is facing an epidemic of drug smuggling in a complex international racket that appears too massive and entrenched for authorities to stop.

Thai policemen carry packages containing some of more than 4 million methamphetamine tablets seized in the northern province of Chiang Rai prior to a press conference at Police headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, in March 2012. Thailand has been waging a war on a major drug problem for years. Pic: AP

Police said on May 2 that they had seized 1 million illicit methamphetamine pills, weeks after discovering nearly 50 million legal tablets to treat common ailments had been stolen from Thailand’s hospitals, to make powerful speed drugs to sell to addicts. An additional 2 billion similar tablets to treat common colds have been smuggled in from Taiwan and South Korea, also to make illegal drugs, authorities said.

Corrupt chemists and drug dealers have been extracting ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from legal cold remedies and similar medicines in Thailand and secretly shipping it across the border into Laos and Myanmar, also known as Burma, where gangs use the ingredients to create a range of amphetamine-based drugs.

Myanmar’s drug gangs work among heavily armed minority ethnic insurgents including the Shan, Wa, and other tribes in the lawless, mountainous jungles near the border where the two countries meet.

Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are used to widen bronchial passages and relieve asthma, hay fever, nasal congestion, allergies and the common cold but can also be a precursor chemical to manufacture methamphetamines.

Officials estimate one legal cold tablet’s ephedrine or pseudoephedrine can be cooked to make three or four methamphetamine pills, enabling gangs to rapidly multiply their output. The speed-like pills they make are then illegally smuggled back into Thailand and sold to users, or distributed to other countries.

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The dispute between China and the Philippines over ownership of the rocks and reefs variously known as Scarborough Shoal/Panatag Shoal/Huangyan Island is at one level very petty. But at another it demonstrates what can best be described blatantly racist bravado on the part of Beijing.

A protester displays a Philippine flag and a placard during a rally outside the Chinese Consulate at the financial district of Makati city, east of Manila, Philippines. Pic: AP.

Manila would do well to learn up some of its own pre-Spanish history so as to better expose the arrogance of a nation which regards other, non-Han people and their histories as non-existent or irrelevant. Han chauvinism is writ large in this tale, which should be a reminder to the Malay peoples whose lands border more than half the South China Sea – itself a name created by westerners and does no more than describe a sea south of China – that they may yet go the way of the Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols and find themselves oppressed minorities in a Han empire.

Beijing’s aggressive stance is doubly unfortunate given the positive role that individual Chinese migrants and their descendants have played in the Philippines for several centuries. When China was closed, its entrepreneurial coastal people found opportunity in the Malay world. Is that era of fruitful interaction to be ended as an open China becomes a threatening China?

The Chinese claim to Scarborough Shoal (to use a relatively neutral word derived from a ship which sank there) is ridiculous on a whole number of grounds yet it persists in trying to enforce it in the correct belief that the Philippines is poor and weak and that ASEAN solidarity is non-existent – for which Malaysia is particularly to blame.

China claims to have “discovered” the island, included it in its territory and exercised control over it. The basis for this claim is simply a map dating from the time when China was under the thumb of a foreign dynasty – that of the Mongol Kublai Khan whose capital was in modern Mongolia. The fact that it is on a map is anyway meaningless in terms of ownership rights – though China often claims that the mere presence of Chinese traders in a place or the payment of taxes to be allowed to trade with China amounted to “tribute” and acceptance of Beijing’s hegemony.

The fact that China stated a claim to Scarborough Shoal in 1932 and again in 1947 is neither here nor there. It is even more outrageous than the actions of British seafarers in the 19th century going around the world planting the British flag and claiming it as theirs. In the case of Scarborough there was not even a planting of a flag and setting up of a permanent settlement. The fact is that Scarborough is uninhabitable and thus fails qualify as an island which would support a claim to surrounding sea.

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Rejection of a request by the electoral reform group Bersih to hold an April 28 sit-in at Dataran Merdeka (Indepedence Square) is a gamble that could turn into a public relations disaster for the Malaysian government, observers in Kuala Lumpur say.

Scenes from the Bersih 2.0 protests in July 2011. Pic: AP.

Representatives of the Kuala Lumpur City Council Friday notified Bersih, a coalition of some 150-odd organizations demanding what they term as free and fair elections, that the permit wouldn’t be granted.

The Bersih 3.0 protest hadn’t been gaining the traction that its predecessor did in July of 2011, when what the organization says were 50,000 marchers were set upon by police with water cannons and tear gas. The resultant outcry in the international press and by human rights organizations shaved 20 percentage points off Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s popularity in public opinion polls.

Najib was forced to go onto the offensive, offering a series of amendments or replacements for unpopular laws including the Internal Security Act, the Publications and Printing Presses Act and several others. His popularity has since rebounded from a low of 59 percent in the wake of the crackdown. It is difficult to imagine that with an election believed to be a month or two away he would dare that kind of opprobrium again.

The Barisan Nasional is currently pulling out all the stops to get the polls underway, with preparations “in full swing,” one United Malays National Organization party operative recently told Asia Sentinel. Najib’s personal popularity, currently at 69 percent, is built on improving public confidence in the general economy and considerable pump-priming with a budget built to please the rakyat, or public. The government can probably expect to stay in power, political observers say, although there is little chance of regaining the historic two-thirds majority in parliament that the coalition had held since independence until 2008.

But while Najib may be personally popular, the Barisan is not. The Malaysian Chinese Association, the second biggest party in the government, is beset with a massive scandal over construction of the Port Klang Free Zone, which is mired in billions of ringgit of debt. The Merdeka Center poll that gave Najib a comfortable lead found that fully a third of those who thought he was doing a good job would vote for the Pakatan Rakyat, the three-party opposition coalition made up of the ethnic Chinese Democratic Action Party, the Islamic fundamentalist Parti Islam se-Malaysia, and opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s own Parti Keadilan Rakyat, or People’s Justice Party, largely made up of urban ethnic Malays.

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Using the White House’s own petitioning system, Vietnamese-Americans have caught the notice of the Obama government in what has been one of the most important achievements by the community to date.

The Obama administration has started to take notice. Pic: AP.

This achievement was the success of a petition launched from the online “We the People” petitioning system developed by the White House as a means of giving minority communities a voice they cannot command through the mainstream media. The petition, which to date has received over 150,000 signatures, called for the Obama Administration to stop expanding trade with Vietnam at the expense of human rights.

Although the ultimate objective of this petition failed to be realized—immediate change was always suspect—participants have much to be proud of in establishing a meeting with members from the Administration.

More than enough signatures

Created on February 7, the petition garnered over 140,000 signatures in 30 days—more than the 25,000 minimum required for the White House to respond. News of the petition quickly spread within the Vietnamese-American community and spilled across the American border to overseas Vietnamese communities, aided in part by social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Unable to deny the success of the petition, the White House received delegates from the Vietnamese-American community to address their concerns in person.

It is not so difficult to imagine why the petition succeeded as it did.

The Vietnamese government has been active in suppressing and violating the human rights of its citizens. Freedom of speech, religion, and assembly are paid lip service but rarely permitted. The notion that democratic and human rights activists in Vietnam will receive a fair trial at the hands of their government is wishful thinking. Vietnamese-Americans are correct in their concern for what is happening.

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What could well be the world’s longest running battle over forestry regulations is taking place in the Australian state of Tasmania, where Greens have been squared off against the forestry industry for at least 30 years, observers say.

Pic: AP.

Sen. Richard Colbeck, the Liberal shadow parliamentary secretary for Fisheries and Forestry, in an interview accused the Greens of seeking to kill the logging industry outright. Bob Brown, also an Australian senator and head of the Australian Greens, in turn accuses the logging industry of being economically not viable and of seeking to exist on government handouts. On top of that, a woman named Miranda Gibson has spent the past 119 days sitting 60 meters above the ground in a massive eucalyptus regnans as loggers have circled below in the forest. In a world where there have been countless tree sittings, Brown calls it the world’s tallest tree sitting.

“Forestry has been a long-running issue for three decades,” Colbeck told Asia Sentinel. “There have been a lot of processes, assessments of how much reserves should be accessible for harvest. That has continued for a long time, formal processes that resulted in the regional forest agreement process of 1997, which set up a process to reserve a significant area, heritage areas. There is a million hectares of Tasmanian forest in reserve. The issue is that the environmental groups haven’t got all they wanted. They want to end logging in Tasmania altogether.” He accused Brown of “wanting to close all of the forest management in Australia.”

Brown, on the other hand, accused the timber industry of a “massive milking of public funds by people who are well practiced at milking public funds.” The environmental groups, he said, “came to the table two years ago.” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard signed an agreement to protect 420,000 hectares of forest in return for A$270 million. The industry, he said, has received A$1 billion in public funds from the state and federal government and “Now has their hand out again.

“But no protection has occurred, and the money is flowing to the industry yet again.” And hence Ms. Gibson in her tree. Some 2,000 hectares has already been logged this summer, he charged. The arguments seem to have taken on a personal tone as only it can be practiced in Australian politics.

“We have got to the absurd point where the industry won’t come to the table unless people like me agree not to contact people like you,” Brown said . “How can a senator agree to a gag order? That is absurd in a democracy. They have made some pretty ludicrous claims in the past, and we will get more in the future.”

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French investigating magistrates probing the US$1.2 billion sale of submarines to the Malaysian Defense Ministry are targeting, among other things, a Hong Kong-based company called Terasasi (Hong Kong) Ltd., whose principal officers are Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s close friend and the friend’s father.

Investigators believe that at least some of the €36 million funneled through Terasasi ended up in the pockets of Najib, who was Malaysia’s defense minister and deputy prime minister when the two Scorpene submarines were purchased from Thales International or Thint Asia. The state-owned defense giant DCN, later known as DCNS, and Thales established a joint company named Armaris to manufacture the submarines in 2002.

The two Armaris Scorpenes, named for the first prime minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman*, and Najib’s father, Tun Abdul Razak, are on duty in Malaysian waters.

Abdul Razak Baginda, the former head of a Malaysian think tank who was at the center of a 2006 investigation into the death of Mongolian translator and party girl Altantuya Shaariibuu, is listed as one of the two directors of the company, which was previously incorporated on June 28, 2002 as Kinabalu Advisory and Support Services Ltd according to the Hong Kong Companies Registry. The other director is Abdul Malim Baginda, Baginda’s father.

The Terasasi offices are located on the 19th floor of an office at 3 Lockhart Road in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong. There is no indication in Hong Kong government records of what Terasasi’s business is. It is only listed as a “local company.” However, French authorities say Terasasi apparently received regular payments from Thint Asia. One payment was for €360,000 accompanied with a handwritten note saying “Razak wants it to be paid quickly.”

The magistrates have documents that show that the money was funneled from Thint Asia to Terasasi — €3 million of it when Terasasi was still domiciled in Malaysia, and €33 million after it was incorporated in Hong Kong. There is no indication at this point where the money went. French investigators, however, theorize that it was part of €146 million that may have been funneled to officials of the United Malays National Organization and Najib, who traveled with Abdul Razak Baginda several times to France as defense minister at the time the Malaysians purchased the submarines from DCNS.

Ho Chi Minh, the Revolutionary leader that fought to reunite Vietnam, is regarded as the founding father of modern day Vietnam. The country will mark the 37th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam, or "American," war, on April 30. Pic: AP

April 30, 1975, holds great significance for the Vietnamese. For some, it is the day when their country was lost. For others it is the day when their country, once divided between North and South, was finally reunited.

For them, April 30 is a date to be celebrated. Ultimately, however, it is the day when Saigon fell to the Communists, and Vietnam and her citizens were forever changed. In wars there are winners and losers; and for those loyal to the government of South Vietnam or opposed the Communist regime, they were the defeated, forced to flee and settle abroad.

Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, these refugees have by and large succeeded in integrating into their new community and rebuilt their lives.

Conversely, those who remained behind, willingly or unwillingly, were subject to poverty and poor leadership of a single-party state.

Continue reading at Asia Sentinel. 

The victory of the main opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) party led by Aung San Suu Kyi should not come as a surprise despite widespread irregularities and the initial fear that the poll would not be free and fair.

Pic: AP

It is Suu Kyi’s iron will and principles that earned the support of the people. The 66-year-old and many other oppressed Burmese knew that to back down now would mean always to be discounted.

This victory, extraordinary as it is, with the NLD sweeping almost every seat, is only for a tiny 45 seats in a Parliament where the military-backed ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) holds an enormous majority.

Yet it demonstrates the will of the people and has laid the groundwork for the NLD and Suu Kyi to prepare for the crucial 2015 general elections. The NLD, winner of the 1990 general elections by a landslide, made a pragmatic decision.

Indeed, this is a small step in Burma’s long struggle for democracy where so much more still needs to be done. There is no magical cure for the country’s ills to shoo away the former dictators and ex-junta generals who are still alive and kicking.

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The March 29 arrest by Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) of a former government chief secretary and two of the Kwok brothers, among Asia’s most powerful property developers who control the giant Sun Kung Kai Properties concern, was a stunning development.

The implications are as yet unclear, although it appears to hand Chief Executive-elect Leung Chun-Ying a golden opportunity to clean up a sector long believed to be uncomfortably close to the government. Leung is already viewed with alarm by the property oligarchs. If two of their most stellar members have been arrested less than a week after Leung was given the job, it gives him additional cachet with the community to start to clean the stables and seek ways to moderate housing prices, among the highest in the world.

The former government official, Rafael Hui, not only occupied the number two post in government for several years until 2007, but he was particularly close to Chief Executive Donald Tsang. He is the most senior official ever arrested by the ICAC. The Kwok brothers are the most high profile arrests of business figures since the Carrian scandal of the early 1980s which saw the arrest of its boss George Tan and several associates and various corrupted bankers.

The investigation is said to center on Hui, who allegedly disclosed confidential information to helpful to Sun Hung Kai pertaining to certain parcels of land. Former Sun Hung Kai Executive Director Thomas Chan was arrested on 19 March. Four others have been arrested in connection with the case, although they are not believed to be either Sun Hung Kai staff or high level government officials.

At one level the latest arrests are very surprising. The public has long believed in the existence of collusion between the government, which controls land supply and development policy, and the top six or so developers who dominate the property market. Nine of the ten richest people in Hong Kong are in property. Developers are known to have close links with officials, some of whom later benefit by retiring early and taking well-paying jobs with the developers. Land use decisions and sales procedures have often been seen to favor them at the expense of smaller developers and the public. However, corruption is easily disguised and hard to prove.

In the Kwok case however, strong leads for the ICAC appear to have come from a third brother who fell out with his siblings a few years ago and who was removed from the board. Another director of SHKP was also arrested earlier and may have provided additional leads. Hui’s past links to the company when he was in the private sector were no secret, but presumably there is now evidence either of payments or other advantages in return for information or favorable decisions when he was Chief Secretary for Administration.

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Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak apparently is having considerable trouble persuading Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, the minister for women, family and community development and the source of a controversy over alleged misuse of public funds, to quit the United Malays National Organization.

Shahrizat Abdul Jalil pictured with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Kuala Lumpur in November 2010. Pic: AP.

It was announced three weeks ago that Shahrizat, who also serves as the head of Wanita Umno, the women’s wing of the party, would step down from the ministry when her Senate* term ends on April 8 as a result of what has become known as the Cowgate scandal. Her husband, Mohamed Salleh Ismail, and other members of the family have been accused of misusing a major portion of a RM250 million soft loan from the government to establish the National Feedlot Corporation, to slaughter cattle under Islamic dietary rules.

Mohamed Salleh Ismail has been charged with criminal breach of trust and violating the Companies Act in relation to allegations of misuse of RM49 million of the funds given to the company. According to a report by Malaysia’s Auditor General, the money was steered into the purchase of things that had nothing to do with the project to slaughter 60,000 cattle annually. The Auditor General found that the project had never come remotely close to meeting its goals. Subsequent allegations have involved the purchase of condominiums in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, travel for the family, a Mercedes-Benz sedan for Shahrizat and other items.

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad reportedly has repeatedly told party leaders Shahrizat must go, party insiders say, and her main protector, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, is also said to be backing away from supporting her.

“Dr M wants her out and his people have told me so,” a source told Asia Sentinel. “So does Muhyiddin who is distancing himself from her. So she is quite alone.”

However, political bloggers in Kuala Lumpur say Shahrizat apparently has demanded successfully that she stay as a member of parliament, and to keep her job as head of Wanita as well.

Continue reading at Asia Sentinel

Leung Chung-ying has been selected as Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive by a large margin of the 1,200 mostly elite voters entitled to make the choice – 690 votes compared with 285 for his only real rival Henry Tang, 80 for Democratic Party candidate Albert Ho and a significant 143 absentees and spoiled ballots.

Leung Chung-ying. Pic: AP.

But the circumstances of his win will not make it easy to gain public trust, let alone push through badly needed reforms in the face of vested interests, most publicly represented by the major property-based oligarchs but including groups close to organized crime. As an example of that lukewarm public trust, 56 percent of the voters in a mock poll organized by Robert Chung of the University of Hong Kong turned in blank ballots in a rebuff to all three of the candidates. The mock poll, expected to draw only 50,000 participants, drew more than 220,000.

Leung is an intelligent man who is articulate, appears to have concerns for grass roots issues and conducted himself with dignity throughout the campaign. But nonetheless he owes his victory more to Tang’s evident failures and to Beijing’s switch of support to him than to his own appeal.

Although always ahead of Tang in popular opinion polls this was largely as a result of Tang’s lack achievements as Chief Secretary and the public sense that he was only there as a tool of fellow tycoons. These would not have mattered but for revelations, which he first denied, about an illegal luxury basement at his family home which he then tried to blame on his wife.

Tang’s low standing evidently made Beijing shift its position despite apparent threats from tycoons attending recent meetings in Beijing that they might reconsider Hong Kong investment if Leung won and implemented ideas to end their grip on the land and property market.

Beijing’s local acolytes, the Liaison Office of the HK & Macau Affairs office and others such as Communist Party mouthpiece Wen Wei Pa, then overdid the pressure to get backing for Leung. In the end the election was marked by protests against Beijing’s interference. So Leung, who has never been popularly elected to any post nor ever served in government, now starts his new career being seen as owing his selection more to Beijing (and Tang) than his own abilities or policies.

The election process has also led to the uncovering of government-related sleaze which the public has always assumed but was seldom able to prove. Now it has the example of Tang plus partly substantiated allegations about a Leung conflict of interest issue, evidence of dinners with unsavory types close to organized crime involving both Leung’s campaign and the current chief executive Donald Tsang.

Continue reading at Travel Wire Asia

Subsidy cut proposals by the Indonesian government are frequently met with public protests. Pic: AP

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s government is facing a major test of its staying power, with thousands of demonstrators across the country protesting plans to modify fuel subsidies that cut the price of fuel nearly in half.

Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party-led government already has been beset with a long series of scandals that have sapped its popularity and cut into its credibility. In the past, Indonesian governments have had a habit of caving in to such protest. However, say political analysts in Jakarta, the decision to cut the amount of the subsidy will likely prevail via a required vote in the House of Representatives, although there are political considerations. The feeling is that if Golkar, the second-biggest party in Yudhoyono’s ruling coalition, remains solidly behind the plan, the government will probably cut the subsidy.

There appears to be considerable horse-trading going on behind the scenes, with the government seeking to use savings from the cut in the fuel subsidy to finance cash payments to consumers to take the sting out of the cut for a few months. Golkar leaders, however, want the savings to be applied to the country’s woefully inadequate infrastructure, whose bottlenecks have got in the way of economic progress as the economy grows. Cutting the subsidy, if it occurs, is estimated to save as much as Rp41.2 trillion (US$4.5 billion) per year.

“Golkar thinks the cash payments are a political trick by the Democrats,” said one veteran political analyst. “They’re right.”

Authorities deployed 14,000 police across the country earlier this week as protesters marched in several cities. Some 4,000 workers protested “peacefully” in front of the state palace in the capital, Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto told reporters Thursday.

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You have just jumped into bed with your sweetie half an hour after taking a dose of the Viagra you just bought at a respectable, trademarked pharmacy. To your utter embarrassment and your sweetie’s amusement, you now notice it doesn’t work.

Fake Viagra, top left, and fake Cialis, bottom left display beside the real tablets. Pic: AP.

It could be because it’s counterfeit, and you are likely to not be alone. Some US$75 billion in fake drugs were sold globally in 2010, vast amounts of them fake antipotency drugs, according to a background paper produced recently for the World Health Professions Alliance. That represents 15 percent of the entire legitimate pharmaceutical industry, according to the study.

Part of the problem is the enormous and inflated cost of conventional drugs, many of which are priced out of the reach of people without insurance. As Asia Sentinel reported, that led the Indian government a week ago to issue the first ever compulsory license to a generic drug manufacturer, effectively ending the German pharmaceutical company Bayer’s monopoly in India on the drug sorafenib tosylate, used to treat kidney and liver cancer – and cutting the cost for treatment from more than US$5,500 per month to about US$175, a reduction of nearly 97 percent.

“These alarming rates of growth are in part as a result of the growing size and sophistication of drug counterfeiting rings,” the World Health Professions Alliance paper said. “Poverty, weak economies and the rising cost of drugs have created a corresponding increase in incentives to produce counterfeit drugs because of profit margin.”

Much of the counterfeit drugs originate in Asia. Indeed, just two days ago, authorities in Spain and the United Kingdom arrested six people and seized 300,000 doses of fake medicines in sophisticated and genuine-appearing blister packs, including Viagra, Cialis, Levitra and weight-loss pills. Those arrested were thought to be part of a gang importing the fakes from Asia, mainly China and Singapore, according to news stories, and distributing them via the Internet to customers throughout Europe.

In 2002, according to World Health Organization statistics quoted by the medical journal Lancet, “as much as 35 percent of the fake and substandard drugs in the world are produced by India and 20 percent by China.” The fake drugs move in all directions throughout Asia, according to the World Health Professions Alliance.

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India’s nascent nuclear power program, begun with great anticipation after the United States government lifted sanctions on the country during the Bush administration, is stalling out as emotional protest gets in the way.

People living near nuclear plant sites shout slogans during an anti-nuclear protest in Delhi, India. Pic: AP.

In a sign that all is not well, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has alleged that American and European NGOs are funding protests against building nuclear plants, particularly at the yet-to-be operational and already-delayed Kudankulam plant in South Indian state Tamil Nadu.

“The atomic energy program has got into problems because these NGOs, mostly I think based in the United States, don’t appreciate the need for our country to increase the energy supply,” Singh said in an interview to an international magazine last month.

It is not unusual for Indian politicians, including Manmohan, whose government is accused of massive corruption scandals, to blame “external factors” or a “foreign hand” to cover for their own failings and frustrations.

On a broader political level, New Delhi’s attempts to push reforms, including in the energy sphere, have been severely hampered by the intransigence of coalition partners, reducing the government to near lame-duck status. Defeats in the round of state elections this month, including the politically vital Uttar Pradesh, could turn the Congress Party-led government inward and to try and pass on its inadequacies to others, real or imagined.

Although New Delhi has ordered investigations into nearly 80 NGOs operating in India in the wake of the Manmohan assertions, the allegations have not found resonance with many. Rejecting Manmohan’s charge, a group leading the anti-Kudankulam protests has demanded that the charges be substantiated.

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Although they stand as a daily reminder to a time when the sun never set on the British Empire, the legions of colonial-era buildings in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, have suffered from neglect and mismanagement for more than 50 years.

Yangon, Burma colonial architecture

But last week the crumbling collection of architectural treasures, which represent the largest remaining stock of such buildings in Southeast Asia, were offered a glimpse of a possible salvation through the formation of an NGO aimed at preserving them – with the approval of President U Thein Sein.

The buildings have been frozen in time by five decades of the Burmese Way to Socialism, as the disastrous economic model was called after Ne Win became prime minister in 1958. Built by British colonial planners, they have never been torn down because private enterprise never got up the momentum to destroy them in favor of more modern structures. Now, like the center of Hanoi, the Bund in Shanghai and parts of the center of Singapore, they stand as architectural gems.

The Yangon Heritage Trust is headed by historian Dr Thant Myint-U and has the approval of the mayor of Yangon and the chief minister of Yangon Region as well as Thein Sein. The trust also includes business tycoons, architects — both Myanmar and foreign – and other NGOs.

Dr Thant Myint-U told the local weekly newspaper The Myanmar Times last week that the trust plans to begin surveying the downtown area – the home of most of the colonial-era buildings – in late March, as part of efforts to prepare a preservation strategy that would be presented to the government in late April or May.

The newspaper also reported that a moratorium had been placed on the demolition of buildings more than 50 years old.

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Two magistrates have been nominated in Paris to investigate the politically explosive 2002 purchase of Scorpene submarines by the Malaysian Ministry of Defense when Najib Tun Razak was Defense Minister.

A Malaysian submarine docks in Port Klang outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Pic: AP.

The case focuses on a 1.2 billion euro contract called a “programme soumalais” with the state-owned French defense giant DCNS, formerly known as DCN. The contract was later transferred to Armaris, a joint venture between DCNS and the French company Thales. In questioning in the Dewan Rakyat, the Malaysian Parliament, it transpired that a €114 million (US$150 million at current exchange rates) commission had been paid to a newly-minted company called Perimekar Sdn Bhd, nominally owned by the wife of one of Najib’s best friends, Abdul Razak Baginda, then the head of a Malaysian think-tank.

It is likely to take several years before the case comes to fruition. In the meantime Najib, now Malaysia’s prime minister and head of the United Malays National Organization, the country’s biggest political party, is preparing for snap elections, possibly in May or June, according to political observers in Kuala Lumpur.

At the heart of the story are allegations of a massive scandal involving not only Malaysian officials but top French politicians and arms purchases in Pakistan, Taiwan, India, Chile, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and other countries as DCNS geared up to sell naval equipment across the planet. The allegations include blackmail, kickbacks, a string of murders in Pakistan, Taiwan and Malaysia and involvement of such top figures as former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and others.

Other magistrates are handling different aspects of the affair. One, called “l’affaire Karachi,” has raised suspicions of the involvement of the current French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who faces a difficult re-election campaign. Sarkozy has angrily denied any involvement. In that case, the deaths of 11 French engineers who were blown up in Karachi was first laid to a bomb set by Al Qaeda. However the bomb was later believed to have been set off by Pakistani military officials angered because the French had reneged on bribes promised by Balladur but cancelled by Jacques Chirac after he defeated Balladur for the presidency.

Judges investigating the affair have been probing whether Balladur received “retro commissions” or kickbacks for the contract. Balladur has given no credible explanation for 10 million French francs (€1.5 million) which found their way into his campaign coffers. Sarkozy was his campaign finance minister at the time.

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India is threatening a “partial” boycott of the Olympic Games, to be held in London from July 27 to Aug. 12, because of Dow Chemical Company’s presence among its major sponsors. This has given the feud between London and New Delhi an unambiguous political overtone.

Children walk near the boundary of Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India. Pic: AP.

The name Dow Chemical has ominous overtones for India. That is because of Union Carbide, which the US-based multinational purchased in 1999, was responsible for the horrific 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, one of the world’s worst industrial catastrophes. A Union Carbide production plant leaked 27 tons of the deadly methyl isocyanate gas in Bhopal, central India, killing more than 20,000 people and exposing over half a million to lifelong illnesses and deformities.

That has brought Dow under sustained heat for its £7 million sponsorship of the London Olympic Games stadium wrap and the Olympic Movement in a US$100 million deal.

Faced with mounting pressure from humanitarian organizations and the media, the Indian Olympic Association and the Indian government have asked the International Olympic Committee to drop the company as the London Games’ sponsor. The bodies claim that the organizers’ association with the US company goes against the principles of the Olympic Charter. “Look beyond the financial implications of the deal and examine the humanitarian aspect of the issue,” Indian Olympics body said.

George Hamilton, Dow’s vice president of Olympic operations, said the Indian government is the one who should be doing the explaining over the contamination of Bhopal rather than his company.

British Prime Minister David Cameron stated that “it would be a very sad day” if India were to withdraw from the Olympics, pointing out that boycotting the event “was not the right thing to do.” The premier underscored that Dow was not the owner of Union Carbide when the deadly gas leak took place in Bhopal in the 1980s.

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If you’re chatting in Chinese on weibo, the enormously popular network of microblogs that make up China’s version to Twitter, and you mention, for instance, an obituary (fùgào) of a friend or public figure, you are going to find the word blocked.

Why? Nobody knows for sure, unless it was because of the false reporting of the death of former President Jiang Zemin, or perhaps the rumor that North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, had been assassinated. Or maybe not.

There have been legions of stories of the Chinese authorities’ exotic approach to the blockage of words on weibo, which has a vast corps of censors watching to make sure no sensitive words slip through. Jason Q. Ng, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States, set out to try to catalogue all the blocked words he could find and to provide possible reasons for the blockage. His efforts can be found at “Blocked on Weibo. For some insights into the sometimes fantastical thinking of China’s censors, it’s worth looking into.

“I finally finished searching through the 700,000 Chinese Wikipedia keywords last month and have verified 1,000-plus unique words to be blocked, but the posting of logs and lists of banned words are temporarily on hold as I try and sort through the data and clean it up,” he wrote on his blog. He found data on Weibo, Google Translate, and Wikipedia, he says, adding “Please note, the translations were automatically generated and have not been checked for accuracy. Full lists of words searched are in individual log posts. “

Some words, he writes, are blocked and later turn out to be unblocked. “Of the 1,300 mostly unique words I found to be unsearchable in my initial test in Nov/Dec 2011, 933 were subsequently unblocked some time in late-January to early-February 2012,” he writes. “But apparently, that was an overreach and as of this morning, 393 of those 933 have been re-blocked (words which include 五毛 [Fifty Cent Party], 轮奸 [gang rape/gangbang], and 梯恩梯 [TNT], among others).

Many blockages are obscure. Deauville (duōwéi’ěr) is the name of a seaside resort city in France that each year hosts the Deauville American Film Festival along with the lesser well-known but similarly respected Deauville Asian Film Festival. Apparently, he writes, “Deauville has screened a number of incredibly raw Chinese films that engage sensitive contemporary topics. The 2010 Grand Prize winner, Judge, is about a death row inmate and the judge who controls his fate. The 2003 winner, Blind Shaft, is a brutal depiction of life as a coal miner in northern China and was banned in the PRC.

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It could be the most unusual trade war in global history. But the multi-billion dollar Macau gambling industry is under assault from a website, www.CasinoLeaks-Macau.com, which is dedicated to exposing the multiple criminal links of the Macau casino operators, not least the US-owned and publicly listed groups, Las Vegas Sands controlled by Sheldon Abelson and Wynn controlled by Steve Wynn’s Wynn Resorts.

Pic: AP.

The site is linked to the International Union of Operating Engineers, a US trade union that represents casino workers in the US but clearly is more than just a crude anti-Macau or anti-Adelson post put up by aggrieved US employees.

Much time and inside research in Macau must have gone into it. Its claims have led the union official, Jeff Fiedler, to write to the Nevada Gaming Control Commission and Nevada Gaming Control Board asking them to investigate the links of the US controlled casinos in Macau to alleged organized crime.

The website has already published considerable detail about the casinos and in particular allegations about the identities of some of the so-called junket operators, the firms and individual firms and individuals who bring high-rolling gamblers to the casinos and are in effect independent sub-contractors who run VIP rooms in the casinos for their clients.

In particular the website has called for investigation into the Neptune Group, which it says has relations with five of the six Macau casino licensees through junket companies it controls. Neptune it says is controlled by one Cheung Chi Tai which till late 2011 owned a gambling ship, the Neptune, often seen in Hong Kong waters, and is a close associate of Macau businessman Lin Cheuk Chiu who, it says, has been named in the mainland media as a money launderer.

The claims are backed by a wealth of corporate and other documents showing Chung’s various links, including with the new Singapore gambling industry. It is promising to tell more in due course, details which could prove highly embarrassing to several individuals in Macau, Hong Kong and the US, to the Macau government which purports to regulate the casinos and to China whose corrupt far cats are the main source of the business but readily launder their ill-gotten gains in Macau under the noses of mainland officials who turn a blind eye to what goes on.

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A year after the disastrous Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami devastated the northwest coast, wiping out villages, killing an estimated 20,000 people and precipitating multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Tokyo’s 35 million residents are getting a severe case of earthquake jitters.

A man is pictured on the empty streets of Tokyo a few days after last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Could there be worse to come? Pic: AP.

In part, of course, the nervousness may stem from memories of the March 11, 2011 shaking, reinforced by numerous one-year-on newspaper and television images of the still-stricken region, but it is also reinforced by new studies from respected institutions predicting that another “Big One” could strike the Tokyo area in four or five years.

These predictions from the University of Tokyo study have provided plenty of grist for doomsday newspaper stories, not to mention plenty of news-you-can use features about how to stock up on canned goods, flashlight batteries and other emergency supplies to tide one over in the event a massive quake hits the capital.

The advertising supplements of Japanese newspapers are full of ads for survival foods, flashlights, attachments to hook cabinets to walls to prevent their toppling over during a shaking. Many supermarkets have reserved whole aisles devoted to these products, some of which are fairly expensive.

Tokyo University based its analysis on the multitude of smaller earthquakes the region has experienced since Mar. 11. During the months of March-April, Tokyo experienced an average of one earthquake in the 4-5 magnitude every day, sometimes twice a day. They have tapered off considerably since then but a shaking is still felt every month or so.

Naoshi Hirata, one of the scientists, explained that the university’s prediction, though centered on Tokyo, the world’s biggest city, covered the entire Kanto Plain area, not just the downtown. It could strike as far as 100 km from the downtown or offshore, he maintained.

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