Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers from overseas:<$>Daytona Beach News-Journal, on Bush’s meeting with China’s president:

A love-fest is the last thing the meeting between President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao at the White House was going to be last week — and the meeting lived up to its ambiguous billing.

For starters, note the difference in the way the two countries’ officials framed the occasion. When outgoing Bush spokesman Scott McLellan confirmed it March 23, he called it “a meeting”. The headline the next day in China Daily, one of China’s English-language government newspapers, termed it a “summit”, a word the White House never used in connection with this visit. Presidents given the full red-carpet treatment at the White House usually get a state dinner. Hu got lunch.

Oil prices hit new records during Hu’s visit and gas prices returned to the $3-a-gallon level last seen when hurricanes were lashing the Gulf of Mexico in August. It’s an election year. Democrats are blaming Republicans’ consumption-oriented energy policy for the higher prices. Bush is blaming China, whose oil consumption has been skyrocketing along with its economic growth (China’s economic growth rate has ranged between seven percent and 12 percent a year since 1992, producing a staggering leap in wealth and development).

But the country’s starting place was low, too. For all China’s growth, it’s consuming just 6.5 million barrels of oil a day, with a population of 1.3 billion. That’s less than one-third the 20 million barrels a day consumed by the United States with a population less than a quarter that of China. China’s rate won’t reach 15 million barrels until 2030, when American consumption is projected to reach 28 million barrels.

The beast, when it comes to oil consumption, isn’t China.

To the Bush administration, however, more conservation and greener industries have no place in American energy futures like sabre-rattling over China’s hunt for oil. America still consumes a quarter of the world’s oil production with less than five percent of the world’s population.

Oil supplies are extremely tight, and China’s consumption is certainly playing a role.

The choice is twofold: unaltered energy consumption at the cost of much higher prices or a radical shift away from energy use as an entitlement. Either way, China isn’t the whipping giant the Bush administration would like it to be. That giant is right here, guzzling on.

Record of Bergen County (New Jersey), on cameras with ‘slimming’ function:<$>

At last, good old-fashioned ingenuity has found a way to address Americans’ battle with their waistlines — no sweat. Instead of the latest diets or an annoying new exercise fad, the easiest way to look slim is a click of a button away.

Hewlett Packard’s latest digital cameras feature an in-camera “slimming” function. In addition to getting rid of “red eye” with a click, the camera’s software can manipulate the image so that the middle is slightly compressed and the outside edges are slightly wider.

Result: A person looks up to ten pounds thinner, almost without lifting a finger. Whether this represents progress in any real sense probably depends on whether you’re the one in the photograph.

Although photographers have long been able to manipulate their pictures using Photoshop and other image editing programs, the new cameras enable even rank amateurs to use an all-digital weight-loss program.

As tennis star Andre Agassi used to say on those Canon Rebel camera commercials, “Image is everything.”

Unless, of course, you have to walk up a few flights of stairs.