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

The Blade, Toledo, Ohio,

on US president Bush

In an attempt to shape how history will view him, President Bush is giving interviews to the media as he prepares to exit the White House. ...

To hear it from Mr. Bush, one would think that his Oval Office service was a string of unbroken successes: He and his team did not miss the warning signs of the 9/11 attack (which took place early in his first term, but on his watch), nor did he abandon the generally meritorious war in Afghanistan to attack faux enemy Iraq under false premises. ...

Similarly, letting New Orleans founder after the hurricanes, having put incompetent people in charge of the emergency response capacity of his government, didn't happen that way. Finally, the train wreck that the American economy suffered, resulting in no small part from his having let the foxes guard the henhouse, had nothing to do with him.

So, either Mr. Bush has been asleep at the switch for the past eight years, or he is able to fool himself and try to fool the American public that it was a great two terms in spite of a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. ...

Middletown Times Herald-Record, NY, on Clinton

So when that 3 a.m. phone call comes in to the White House next year, Hillary Clinton may wind up on one end of the conversation after all. It just won't be on the receiving end. Rather, the senator from New York may well be calling in her new capacity as secretary of state, to tell her commander in chief, President Barack Obama, of a crisis breaking out in some corner of the world. Irony is beautiful, isn't it? ...

The nomination of Clinton to the top foreign policy position in the next administration provides substance to Obama's repeated campaign promise to look beyond political differences and search for a new way of governing that includes a variety of viewpoints. But as he went about selecting his own version of Lincoln's "team of rivals" as a Cabinet, the president-elect made sure to remind everyone that, when all the competing views were expressed, the ultimate policy decisions still would reside with him. ...

As for Clinton, her new position as premier foreign policy adviser to the president and the face and voice of America to the rest of the world may not be the one to which she aspired when the presidential campaign began two years ago, but it is a vital one at a time when this nation needs intelligent, strong, creative leadership to fight the threat of terrorism and to heal diplomatic wounds. ...