These are excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers around the world:

The Watertown (N.Y) Daily Times, on Abu Ghraib (January 17):

Spc. Charles Graner, the alleged ringleader of rogue guards at Abu Ghraib, has been convicted on all ten counts under five charges: assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty. He was sentenced to ten years in military prison by a jury of four Army officers and six senior enlisted men.

Mr. Graner, 36, an Army reservist from Pennsylvania, will be dishonourably discharged after completing his sentence. He has been demoted and ordered to forfeit all pay and benefits.

The reservist, who was shown smiling next to human pyramids of naked prisoners and, in one case, beside a dead Iraqi, maintained he was just following orders. He said intelligence agents at the prison ordered the abuse of prisoners to make them easier to interrogate.

So far, authorities have not uncovered a wider network of abuse or found evidence to validate Graner's explanation that he is being made a scapegoat. Four soldiers have pleaded guilty in the case. Two other guards are awaiting trial.

Bringing the offenders to justice shows the world that the United States does not tolerate such misconduct. It is the right thing to do and the right message to send.

Daily Telegraph, London, on the second Bush administration (January 19):

Any faint-hearted observer who hoped that the second Bush administration would be less of a white-knuckle ride than the first had better think again.

For if Condoleezza Rice has her way, American diplomacy will no longer be used to rein in the President's ambition to "create a balance of power in the world that favours freedom," but rather to support it.

At her Senate confirmation hearing, the putative Secretary of State set out a vision of global US activism that, if not explicitly neo-conservative, is in stark contrast to her predecessor's policy of cautious restraint.

Miss Rice is a realist rather than an ideologist. Yet she is not an exponent of realpolitik in the mold of Henry Kissinger, the last national security adviser to make the transition to the State Department. Unlike Kissinger and most traditional diplomatists, she believes passionately that sowing democracy and uprooting tyranny is not only right for humanity, but also the key to US security. She is now the high priestess of the Bush doctrine.

Miss Rice made her name in the Cold War; she prefers to overthrow evil empires by fomenting revolutions, rather than mounting invasions. She wants "a conversation, not a monologue" with the world, but her solution to Islamist terrorism is identical to the President's: "Drain the swamp." Like Mr. Bush, she sees neutralising Iran and North Korea as urgent. And woe betide any European leader who dares to condescend to Condoleezza.