Council on Foreign Relations

Arab News (Saudi Arabia)

• Yet Another Peace Plan: In an editorial, the paper says the decision to draft a proposed peace accord for the Middle East does not necessarily mean agreement has been or will be reached on the major issues of final borders, the status of Jerusalem, and the right of return.

Australian

• Rudd In Japan: In an editorial, the paper describes Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's bid to promote closer multilateral ties between the countries at the core of the new global dynamic as a laudable step.

Business Day (South Africa)

• Inflation Honeymoon: Philip Mohr, a former professor of economics, writes that South Africa’s honeymoon with inflation targeting is clearly over. The important question, he says, is how the Reserve Bank should react.

Christian Science Monitor

• Hike Interest Rates: In an editorial on the U.S. economy, the paper says it has enough underlying strength to bear the burden of higher interest rates. Without them, it believes, the U.S. will only lose its strength in the long term if high inflation takes hold.

Daily Star (Lebanon)

• Bush’s Iraq Legacy: In an editorial, the paper says George W. Bush's efforts to salvage something from the defining project of his presidency, the cynical and disastrous war in Iraq, say much about his motivations in having started it.

Daily Telegraph

• Why McCain Will Win: Columnist Janet Daley makes the case for the Republican candidate and says for most Americans this election will be about proven character and tested judgment.

Dominion Post (New Zealand)

• Obama’s Race Challenge: In an editorial, the paper says race will remain the elephant in the room in the presidential contest as it did in the Democratic primaries.

Financial Times

• Ordinary Obama: Columnist Clive Crook says Barack Obama has come an awfully long way on being an extraordinary politician. His new challenge is to be a competent ordinary one as well.
• An End To Colombia’s War? In an editorial, the FT says the remaining leaders of Colombia’s Farc may put a brave face on it but Latin America’s oldest active leftwing guerrilla movement is on the ropes.
• Asia’s Rampant Inflation: In a further editorial, the paper says Asian governments and central banks have belatedly woken up to the menace of rising inflation.
• Building Bridges: Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform writes that the EU and China should build a strategic partnership, focused on issues that cause tensions but which, if tackled in a serious dialogue, could strengthen global governance.

Guardian

• The Clinton Effect: In an editorial, the paper says the curious upshot of Hillary Clinton's defeat is that the campaigns might now become more interested in women.
• Obama’s Challenge: Columnist Gary Younge writes that the great thing about Obama's candidacy is that he has raised expectations about what American can be and do in a way that nobody else has or could in recent memory.
• Globalization Is Good: Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, writes that the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has never erred in rejecting the false comforts of populism and setting out a positive politics of globalization. The world, he says, needs to hear the same message from President Obama or McCain.

Haaretz

• Ousting Olmert: The paper, in an editorial, calls on Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, to come to his senses and take concrete steps that would compel the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to immediately relinquish management of the state's affairs.

Hindustan Times

• Relentless Inflation: Kaushik Basu of Cornell University writes that India needs to work on a war-footing to cut bureaucracy, increase efficiency and attract international business. This, he believes, will help stave off the immediate crisis, create employment and yield large, long-run benefits.  

Independent (UK)

• Obama’s Mixed Roots: Columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes that Barack Obama is not black. He is, she says, the first mixed-race politician ever to get this far in the onerous and arduously testing American electoral process.  

International Herald Tribune

• Pentagon Gets Tough: In an editorial, the paper says Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to fire the top two air force leaders on Thursday was as surprising as it was commendable.
• Europe’s Banking Challenge: Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, writes that like the other central banks in the industrialized world, the ECB is facing three major challenges affecting its monetary policy.

News (Pakistan)

• Probing Benazir’s Death: In an editorial, the paper says the risk remains that the murder of Benazir may forever remain a matter of doubt and conjecture.

New York Times

• Food Summit Failure: In an editorial, the paper says at last week’s United Nations food summit, the world’s more-developed nations proved, once again, that domestic politics trumps both humanitarian concerns and sound strategic calculations.
• Kremlin Censorship: In a further editorial, the Times notes that Russia’s national networks, the most powerful media in the country, are routinely deleting news or opinions critical of the Kremlin.
• Katrina’s Homeless: Also in an editorial, the paper says New Orleans is struggling with a growing number of sick and disabled people who have become homeless since the hurricane in 2005, and calls for local, state and federal action.
• America Transformed: Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman says Barack Obama’s nomination is possible today because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.

Sydney Morning Herald

• Rudd in Japan: In an editorial, the paper says the Australian Prime Minister will find verbal support from Japanese leaders for his idea of an Asia-Pacific community, but he will also be confronted with some of the cultural, trade, and diplomatic obstacles to such a community becoming more than just another talkfest.

Times of India

• India’s Inflation Crisis: In an editorial, the paper says it would not be wrong to describe the present situation as a national as well as international crisis.

Times of London

• Zimbabwe’s Traumatic Endgame: Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society offers five possible outcomes to the next three weeks leading up to Zimbabwe’s presidential run-off.
• The New Kennedy: Columnist William Rees-Mogg writes that Barack Obama is the Kennedy of a new generation. Like Hillary in the primaries, McCain has to row against the tide, he says. It is Obama, like John F.Kennedy, who has the momentum of history.
• Bush’s Farewell: In an editorial, the paper says it is inevitable that despite the speeches and courtesies there will be a hollow note to President Bush's farewell visit to Europe this week.

Wall Street Journal

• Stagflation Looms: In an editorial, the paper says Friday's market rout in employment, oil, the dollar and stocks was not the end of the world, but it is a warning. The message is that the current Washington policy mix of easy money and Keynesian fiscal "stimulus" is taking us down the road to stagflation.
• Weak Dollar: Judy Shelton, an economist, writes that maintaining a stable currency is a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative.
• Bondage in Brazil: In an editorial in the Journal’s Asia edition, the paper says in Brazil, home of ethanol made from sugar cane, the biofuels boom has had another unintended consequence: slavery.
• Myanmar’s Business As Usual: In a further editorial, the paper says it’s back to business as usual in Burma, which should teach the UN and Asean that its softly-softly approach to Burma is working for the junta, not the Burmese people.

Washington Post

• Bad Intelligence: Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt says it trivialiszs America’s intelligence failure on Iraq to say simply that “Bush lied.”
• Iraq’s Electoral System: Scott Carpenter of the Washington Institute and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute write that election systems matter and that there is a real opportunity to reform Iraq’s, at least at the local level.
• Reforming Campaign Finance: In an editorial, the Post says Barack Obama and John McCain should use the federal financing system for the fall campaign -- and reform it afterward.

Washington Times

• Zimbabwe On The Brink: Paul Moorcraft of the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis writes that Zimbabwe could still erupt in nationwide violence on the Kenyan model, or worse. Or, he says, South Africa, and perhaps even China, might be able to enforce a relatively peaceful, if still stage-managed, fresh election.
• Soft On Iran: Peter Huessy of GeoStrategic Analysis writes that the election of Barack Obama would destroy a chance for the United States and Europe to be protected from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles.