Leather? No Problem; but Horsewhips?

* Singapore “The Americans, who tend to be nags when dealing with Japan, would only say it was ‘a useful first step.’ Bad sports.”

-- The Straits Times, on Japan’s plans to spend $191 billion on public works to help overcome industrial-bloc recession.

* Hong Kong “The aim, it seems, is to pose less of a threatening image to a middle America for whom homosexuality is synonymous with bun-hugging leather and horsewhips. The problem here is that homosexuals are not like America, they are part of America. What, in other words, is wrong with leather?”

-- Marlowe Hood in the South China Morning Post, writing about gays seeking wider acceptance in America.

* Taiwan “What countries should develop nuclear weapons? Which countries should not? At present, this judgment is entirely in the hands of the West.”

-- Commentary, the China Times Express.

* Korea “Spiritual poverty, moral degradation, social complications, and so on, can provide fertile land for solitary moderns seeking to escape from their misery into messianic salvation.”

-- The Korea Times, on the “mass suicide” of David Koresh and his followers in Waco, Tex.

* China “Although the hot war in the Balkans will not ignite a new world war, it has become and will continue to be a symbolic battlefield between powerful Western countries and the hegemonic U.S. in the struggle over the right to shape the post-Cold War “new world order.”

-- Commentary in Shanghai Wenhui Daily.

* Australia “The Bosnian situation is, by and large, a European concern.”

-- The Canberra Times, commenting on America’s preoccupation with ex-Yugoslavia while paying small heed to the reconstruction of Cambodia.

“Arming the Muslims a year ago might have made sense. Doing it now would, as the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, has said, create “a level killing field.”

-- The Australian, editorializing that the Vance-Owen plan “is still the best hope” for peace in Bosnia.

* New Zealand “Such a scheme is a recipe for drawing out the war for years.”

-- The Nelson Evening Mail, on the idea of sending arms to Bosnian Muslims.

“The time has arrived when to do nothing is to condemn many thousands of innocent people to squalid deaths.”

-- The Timaru Herald, calling for increased military intervention in Bosnia under U.N. auspices.