The following are selections from editorial opinions from around the world which may be of interest to Royal Gazette readers.

Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, on US president George W Bush’s State of the Union speech<$>

With his fifth State of the Union speech, president George W. Bush could have revitalised his presidency. He could have laid out bold plans with bipartisan appeal to tackle some of the country’s most stubborn problems.

Unfortunately, Mr. Bush’s agenda was too timid. Too often Tuesday night, he pulled out old pages from his political playbook.

Mr. Bush’s clarion calls from last year’s speech for Congress to revamp Social Security and immigration laws were muted this year. Yet the need for reform in both has grown more acute.

Instead, the president spotlighted other pressing concerns, including high health-care and energy costs and the budget deficit. But for the most part, he offered familiar and flawed solutions.

On health care, economists differ on whether Mr. Bush’s well-worn proposals for expanded tax-free health-savings accounts and more tax deductions for medical expenses would even bring down costs. And most Americans without health insurance <\m> their ranks have risen by more than a million during Mr. Bush’s presidency <\m> don’t earn enough to set aside much money for health care.

It’s too bad that Mr. Bush didn’t propose policies that would directly address the availability of health insurance. Those could include, for example, offering Americans the same private insurance options as federal employees.

On energy, Mr. Bush’s calls for new nuclear power plants and efforts to promote efficiency and alternative fuels are welcome. They are, however, long-term solutions to high costs and what the president aptly described as America’s oil addiction.

Mr. Bush could accelerate the move away from oil and ease prices by setting ambitious targets for cutting imports and embracing higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks, which account for half of US oil consumption.

On the budget deficit, Mr. Bush repeated his call for Congress to restrain federal spending. But the president has never used his authority to veto a single spending bill. And he undercut his message of fiscal responsibility by again urging Congress to make permanent his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Doing so would add $2.3 trillion to deficits over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The president’s address was not bereft of good ideas. His program for improving math, science and engineering education, for example, looks promising.

And Mr. Bush was both eloquent and convincing in arguing that America’s security is enhanced by the spread of freedom abroad. Many of his goals earned applause from both parties.

But overall, Mr. Bush’s speech was a disappointment, with its partial and politically challenged solutions. It fell short of what’s needed in what the president rightly called a “decisive year”.