How others see us

The Hindu newspaper - India

......on the 2nd of March, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian Government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe — no shrinking violet himself.) But when George Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.

We really would prefer that he didn't.

It's not in our power to stop Bush's visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will. The Government, the Police and the Corporate Press will do everything they can to minimise the extent of our outrage. Nothing the Happynews Papers say can change the fact that all over India from the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places and private homes — George W. Bush, incumbent President of the United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just not welcome.

NRC Handelsblad - The Netherlands

With regard to technology and innovation, the U.S . is getting way ahead of Europe. India and China are coming up from the rear. That's why Chairman Barroso of the European Commission wants to establish a new technological institute. "Just another top-down approach."

Brussels/Rotterdam: Sooner or later the subject comes up. These days almost no gathering takes place in Brussels at which the Indians and Chinese are not discussed. They work harder, they are less expensive. And they are getting more clever all the time.

Yesterday, President Barroso of the European Commission presented Europe's answer to that danger from the east, or at any rate, part of the answer: a European Institute of Technology (EIT). Not entirely coincidentally, the abbreviation looks a lot like that of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). What MIT is to America , EIT should become to Europe. "A flagship," Barroso calls it, of innovation and enterprise. Only with this will Europe quickly be able to maintain itself on the global marketplace.

Le Figaro - France

The Islamic Republic of Iran, which is 90% Shiite, immediately reacted to the attack on the Samarra Mosque by heaping responsibility on "the Zionists and the occupiers." But for many analysts, Tehran would be wiser to concern itself with the risk of an interfaith conflict overflowing into Iran, rather than blaming, once again, a Western conspiracy.

Yesterday, thousands of Iranians took to the streets after Friday prayers to protest the destruction of this sacred Shiite site - which housed the mausoleums of two imams - by calling for the deaths of America and Israel, and demanding the withdrawal from Iraq of all occupation forces.

For Aladdin Borujerdi, the head of the parliamentary commission charged with foreign policy and national security, "the Americans and their allies planned this conspiracy in order to prolong their presence in Iraq." His words echoed those of the religious leader [and Supreme Leader], Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who on Wednesday accused "the enemies of Islam."

Posted on The Human Stain