ITALY

ITALY
Corriere della Sera, Milan, Dec. 12: When the Cold War ended, most of the world's democracies cut military spending. With no real enemy to target, their intelligence services stopped monitoring "ordinary citizens" and started focusing on industrial espionage instead.
Governments gave the private sector, civil society, human and environmental rights groups more space to act in areas that were once off-limits to all but the state.
With the passing of the ideological conflict between East and West, new social struggles took center-stage -- the right to privacy, the rights of women and children, the humane treatment of animals and the scrapping of Third World debt.
Authorized detention: But in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the state has reconquered lost ground. The United States scrapped the right to a fair trial in court cases dealing with immigration. President George W. Bush banned several Islamic charity organizations without providing evidence of their alleged wrongdoing. The British government has authorized detention without trial for indefinite periods. The European Union has rushed to adopt wide-ranging international arrest warrant measures.
The fight against terrorism is not an excuse to curb civil rights..
JAPAN
Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, Dec. 6: Enron's downfall was triggered by revelations of the huge losses sustained by its off-the-books partnerships. They prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate.
The global economy is still reeling from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Enron's fall should not become yet another disruptive element in an already shaken international economic environment.
Energy: If Japan's policy-makers can draw any lesson from Enron's failure, it is that it is dangerous to treat energy -- an essential for the economy and for daily life -- as a financial product.
Liberalizing the market for electricity requires an exchange to buy and sell it. Such an exchange would inevitably draw swarms of investors willing to bet on making a quick profit. But the main players should be the operators of power plants and other electricity providers.
The Enron saga, with its sad ending much like the California energy crisis, offers some precious lessons for Japan's architects of power-industry liberalization. The war may be over. The dangers are not.