Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers from around the world:

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, on Jimmy Carter’s visit to Cuba.<$>

On Tuesday night, the people of Cuba got a glimpse of freedom they have not themselves enjoyed in 42 years.

A former US president, Jimmy Carter, appeared on Cuban television and openly bucked his own country’s leadership by calling for the United States to lift its economic and travel embargo against the island nation. But Carter also openly bucked his host, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, by calling for political and economic freedom in Cuba and by rejecting Castro’s bogus claim that the island’s poverty is the result of the US embargo.

Castro will not be around much longer, and when he goes, so will his system. Cuba will be free again and soon after, travel and trade between the two nations will exceed anything that existed before Castro smothered Cuban liberty in 1959.

The groundwork for that happy day can be laid now by ending the embargo. Carter’s visit pointed the way.Los Angeles Times, on ‘Safeguards on Student Visas’.Most of the nearly 850,000 non-immigrant foreigners who attend US colleges and universities in a given year add greatly to the educational experience of American students. They also bolster international relations by returning to their homelands with a better understanding of how this nation works. Unfortunately, as September 11 made clear, the system that oversees foreign students must give priority to contending with the handful who would take advantage of this nation’s openness to attack it.

Congress has belatedly ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to develop an electronic system to keep track of foreign students.

The INS’ Student and Exchange Visitor Information System would use a Web-based database that would link US embassies and consulates abroad with every INS port of entry and the 70,000 schools and other institutions eligible to admit foreign students. Lawmakers need to keep establishment of that system on schedule, making sure it is up and running by the January 1, 2003, deadline. Liberation, Paris, on George W. Bush and terrorism.

After having surfed the wave of patriotism caused by the September 11 tragedy, George W. Bush has every reason to be worried before the November (legislative) elections. ... The danger is still there, and the Republican administration has just acknowledged it spectacularly via Vice President Dick for whom “an attack against the United States is practically a certainty”.

This state of high alert is undoubtedly not as innocent as we would like to believe ... George Bush was implicated by the Democrats for serious inadequacies in the fight against terrorism ... before September 11.

On at least three occasions, the Republican administration was warned against the risks of aerial terrorism but it was very quick to lower its guard. If it’s true that these warnings didn’t mention the Twin Towers or the Pentagon, there was at least one federal agency such as the FBI that took it lightly during the months preceding Sept. 11.

Just like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who preferred at that time to concentrate on putting a missile defence system in place rather than anti-terrorism. The last explosive interrogation of the Democrats: George Bush himself, who misguidedly prolonged his vacation on his Texas ranch, could he have been less surprised by the September 11 tragedy than he claimed?