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

The Augusta Chronicle, Georgia

on 9/11 terrorist's American-soil trials

The five terrorists that will be put on trial in an American courtroom plan to use the event to spread their virulent views, one of their attorneys admits.

We love that the attorney is being so open and honest about it. But as courtroom blockbuster surprises go, this is hardly one of them. The terrorists' plot to use the unwarranted mouthpiece of an American courtroom to spread their bile is so patently obvious that you have to ask: Is it just what the Obama administration wants?

Does the Obama administration have that dim a view of America and how it has protected itself against Islamic terrorists that it wants to give five of them a soapbox? Do they hate the Bush-Cheney team so much that they're willing to use terror trials and terrorists to indict the former administration in a public courtroom?

Otherwise, what could possibly be the point of trying enemy combatants in a civilian courtroom? The administration even admits that acquittals won't set the suspected terrorists free. Again, what is the point? ...

It's as if the president of the United States and his attorney general, Eric Holder, were sympathetic to the terrorists' cause and want to give them a pulpit from which to attack America.

The Globe and Mail, Toronto,–Dmitry Medvedev's new rhetoric

Russian Federation president Dmitry Medvedev's criticism of the governing United Russia party's heavy-handedness at its annual convention on Saturday suggests that intraparty infighting has replaced inter-party democratic competition, but raises some hope that Mr. Medvedev is asserting his independence from Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister and former president.

On Monday, he followed up this sign of comparative liberalism by submitting to the Russian parliament a new statute to support non-governmental organisations.

On the other hand, he upheld his own tsar-like power — established in 2004 by Mr. Putin when he was president — to appoint the governors of Russia's 89 regions, and replaced four of them.

Mr. Medvedev began his convention speech by praising Russia's handling of the economic crisis, yet went on to say that the country has "a backward, commodity-based economy, which is in the modern sense of the word can hardly be called an economy."

Turning to politics, he observed that "being the ruling party ... is not a lifelong privilege." Mr. Medvedev came close to acknowledging a one-party dominance — somewhat reminiscent of the much more oppressive Communist Party of the Soviet Union — by pointing out that "practically all government elite are in your ranks," a status that, in his view, imposes special responsibilities. ...

Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev appear to continue to be on good terms, but the divergence of their rhetoric raises the prospect that Russian politics will come to be largely about two factions within the governing party, something like the rivalry of the Chrétien and Martin factions at a time when the Liberals seemed to many to be likely to stay in power for a long time, though Canada is of course far more democratic than Russia.

The current duet of the Prime Minister and the President is odd, but Mr. Medvedev's direct criticism of the governing party awakes some hope that Russia will start to move away from Mr. Putin's authoritarianism.