LATVIA

LATVIA

Diena, Riga, May 20: Even China’s communist leaders cannot look on indifferently at what is taking place in Myanmar. A cyclone and flood have created a calamity that has taken, as it now appears, some 150,000 lives. ... The ruling junta’s inability and lack of desire to improve the situation could be regarded as fateful. Yet China’s communists have already offered political support to the neighboring country’s generals.

The Chinese made a major problem for themselves once they decided to hold the Olympic games. The Olympic torch relay turned out to be a public relations disaster for the regime. And the moment when the world’s attention was turned to Beijing, a devastating hurricane in China-favored Myanmar and an earthquake in the central Chinese province of Sichuan occur.

Ineffective regime

The way state institutions reacted to the consequence of the cyclone in Myanmar, and how they were responsible for the consequences in Sichuan, clearly show that authoritarian regimes are ineffective in managing state affairs.

It would be hasty to predict that the Olympic games and the catastrophic inability to build safe housing not only for themselves for their own citizens will be the beginning of the end for China’s communists.

BRITAIN

The Daily Telegraph, May 21: Coined by Gordon Brown, popularized by Tony Blair, the slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” now has a hackneyed ring but it neatly encapsulated New Labor’s take on criminal justice when it was elected to power in 1997.

The powerful message was that unless the deeper social causes of criminality were tackled, crime would continue to rise.

The sloganizing has not, regrettably, been matched by action. The symptoms, not the causes, of criminal activity have been the focus of policy making in the subsequent 11 years. The result of this failure to live up to the rhetoric is exposed in today’s independent study of youth offending by criminologists at King’s College, London. The study debunks government claims that there have been “significant improvements” and instead reveals there has been “no measurable impact”.

A slogan

In other words, the New Labor’s anti-crime slogan has remained just that, a slogan. ... There is an opportunity here for the Conservative Party whose leader, David Cameron, has begun to construct a coherent approach to young offending that places the right emphasis on the root cause of the problem fractured families and social breakdown.

JAPAN

Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, May 19: The devastating earthquake in southwestern China is a calamity of unfathomable proportions. It is said there are still more than 10,000 victims buried under the huge swaths of rubble. The death toll may well surpass 50,000.

Also of unparalleled proportions are the rescue and relief efforts under way in China’s Sichuan province. The teams are fighting against time.

In previous disasters, the Chinese government almost never accepted foreign relief teams; the decision to allow in foreign relief teams was an extraordinary one on the government’s part. In addition to Japan, China has decided also to accept teams from South Korea, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan.

Outside help

We laud the Chinese government’s decision to accept outside help, albeit belatedly.

For a country that has always dealt on its own with domestic disasters, seeking foreign help was a striking departure.