BRITAIN

BRITAIN
Financial Times, London, Oct. 4: President George W. Bush's choice of Harriet Miers, White House legal counsel, for the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the recently retired Sandra Day O'Connor, is perplexing -- not least for his conservative supporters.
After the successful installation of John Roberts as chief justice there was no more eagerly anticipated decision. Conservatives and the religious right expected Mr. Bush to use this pivotal position to tilt the court in their direction for the next generation. Liberals have been preparing to do battle to prevent precisely that outcome.
Both sides will have to wait some time to judge what this choice portends, because the president has reached into his intensely loyal inner circle and pulled out someone with no judicial record at all. Although he was widely expected to replace a woman with another woman on the bench, this is being seen as a "stealth pick." That is quite a gamble at a time when Mr. Bush is desperately trying to regain the initiative and re-establish his leadership credentials after Hurricane Katrina and amid collapsing domestic support for the war in Iraq.
'Pit bull'
Ms. Miers is a lawyer with a background in corporate cases who once headed the Texas bar association. But she has never been a judge. She became attached to Mr. Bush's entourage when, as governor of Texas, he appointed her head of the state lottery commission. He once described her as "a pit bull in size six shoes." Nominating her yesterday, he underlined that she would "strictly interpret our constitution and our laws. She will not legislate from the bench."
That is pretty much the position staked out by Chief Justice Roberts at his confirmation hearings. He intimated that, whatever his private views, he would eschew judicial activism and interpret law with rigorous respect for its corpus of precedents. Yet Mr. Roberts, a mainstream conservative with impeccable legal credentials, still had half the Democrats in the Senate vote against him. Ms. Miers, by contrast, is an unknown quantity. The Republican right, feeling entitled to one of their own in this vacancy, is sounding at best underwhelmed, worried about what it does not know about Mr. Bush's choice. The Democrats are in the same position. They will conduct a forensic investigation into Ms. Miers' record and will almost certainly try to fit her into a presidential pattern of appointing cronies to sensitive positions.
Just how sensitive will become apparent as and when difficult and divisive issues such as abortion, federal versus states' rights or the death penalty come before the court.
The stage is set for drawn-out confirmation hearings, which is where Ms. Miers will have to earn her elevation. For all Mr. Bush's habitual effusiveness towards those in his tight circle of admirers, there is little to suggest she is Supreme Court justice material, so far. She has everything to prove.
CANADA
Winnipeg Free Press, Oct. 4: Three years after the previous nightclub bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali, terrorists struck again on Saturday. Three suicide bombers wearing explosives blew themselves up, killing between 20 and 30 people and injuring 104.
The purpose of this weekend's attack and of the Oct. 12, 2002, attack, in which 202 were killed and a further 209 injured, may have been to frighten tourists away from the beach resort. But the terror effect was clearly short-lived because the resort was once again filled with holiday-makers.
The death toll in the latest attack was uncertain because the authorities were recovering dismembered body parts and it was not immediately obvious how many people had died. A hospital yesterday said 29 and the police commander said 22. Either way, the toll was far less than three years ago.
Terrible crimes
A similar decline in lethal power of terrorist attacks has been seen in western Europe. The commuter train bombings in Madrid in March 2004 killed 191 people and injured 1,500 while the July bus and underground attacks in London this year killed 56 and injured about 700. These are terrible crimes in which civilians die for somebody's political campaign.
Governments of all countries have to be alert to the efforts of fanatics. The evidence suggests, however, that anti-terror efforts are bearing fruit, because the terrorists have nothing like the power they seemed to have when the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were destroyed in September 2001. Terrorist havens have been eliminated.
Bank transfers between terror agents and their employers have been impeded. Air travelers are much more carefully watched. We have all paid a price in privacy and civil liberties, but at least the terrorists have been weakened and the death tolls have shrunk.