1. SAUDI ARABIA

1. SAUDI ARABIA

Arab News, Riyadh, May 10: The massive 720-billion euro bailout for struggling euro zone countries, Greece, Spain and Portugal, was greeted by market rallies around the world.

Such a surge was almost certainly more about investors snapping up assets cheapened by recent sharp price falls than any vote of confidence in the package put together by European Union foreign ministers.

Close analysis of this substantial funding demonstrates that even if it is a fix, it is only temporary and much else needs to be done if the euro is to survive as a currency, let alone as the reserve currency that its founding fathers hoped it would be. The metaphor of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike illustrates the problem well. As long as the EU bailout is stopping the hole in the three currently over-borrowed and weak economies, the danger is postponed. However, merely producing a temporary block of the leak is not going to mend the hole. Nor is it addressing the issues that caused that hole in the first place. Thus worst of all, if that weakness is not identified and remedied, then there could be more holes appearing than EU finance ministers have the financial fingers to block.

What is needed is a radical boost to the long-term solvency of these struggling states and that will only come by admitting and acting on the problem. Athens is facing widespread popular resistance to its swinging cuts and tax rises. Lisbon and Madrid hardly seem to have begun to address their credit crunch, though the Portuguese government did halt major infrastructural investments including a new airport for the capital.

2. BRITAIN

The Daily Telegraph, London, May 12: With considerable grace and dignity, Gordon Brown brought 13 years of Labour rule to an end. Five full days after the polls closed in the 2010 general election, the country finally has a new government.

With David Cameron as prime minister and the newly minted coalition commanding a comfortable majority in the House of Commons, that is — finally — what it has got. Cameron made no attempt to underplay the task confronting the new administration as he arrived in Downing Street — the deficit, a fractured society and a political system that has forfeited public trust. Yet, as he did throughout the election campaign, the prime minister struck a strong note of optimism, a commodity that will be sorely needed in the weeks and months ahead.

The future is Cameron’s.The struggle he has had to get into Downing Street ... will be as nothing compared to what awaits him. The country faces an age of austerity which will throw up the most testing challenges. Our new prime minister enters into the toughest political inheritance in recent times. We will soon find out his true mettle.