Montreal Gazette: Newly revealed "secret history" written by U.S. officials has detailed how successive administrations provided refuge to Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of the Second World War. "America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted became -in some small measure -a safe haven for the persecutors as well," said a report from the Office of Special Investigations, first revealed by the New York Times.
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The Globe: The United States’ failure to recognize the lesser culpability of juveniles, at every stage of the incarceration and trial of Canadian Omar Khadr, shows that country’s military-justice system in a poor light. The jury’s sentence of 40 years – on top of the eight Mr. Khadr already served in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – takes the breath away. Mr. Khadr was, by the evidence of the U.S. justice department, no older than 11 when his parents left Canada and began raising him in the terrorist camps of al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan.

The Economist: IN 2003 Bono, a rock star and poverty campaigner, proclaimed that “The world needs more Canada”. This week, the world decided it didn’t. On October 12th Canada lost its bid for a rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council, for the first time since the organisation was founded in 1945. That Germany was preferred was acceptable; not so, being passed over in favour of Portugal.
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The Globe: Victory is not in the bag, but chances are still good that Canada will win a seat in the UN Security Council election to be held on Oct. 12. We have been elected every time we have run, roughly once each decade, since 1948; governments from Pearson and Trudeau to Mulroney and Chrétien have built a solid reputation at the UN for Canada over many years; and we have been campaigning for this election off and on since we last left the council in 2000. Our ambassador in New York has been burning the midnight oil for several years pursuing the 128 votes we need to get elected.

National Post: On Thursday, Stephen Harper visited the United Nations to make a plea for Canada having another turn on the UN Security Council. Why? After so many instances of the UN’s impotence, corruption and waste, why does the body still retain any residue of prestige. Is a seat on the Security Council worth the public begging? The UN is a study in moral relativism: It presents the same countenance to the most despotic regime as it does to a genuine democracy. Its so-called Human Rights Council is a byword for farce.

Al Jazeera: The leader of a small church in the US state of Florida says he is determined to go through with his plan to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, despite an international outcry against it. Terry Jones, the pastor, said on Wednesday that he has received encouragement for his protest, with supporters mailing copies of the Islamic holy text to his church in Gainesville. The plan is to incinerate the Qurans in a bonfire on Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

National Post: The impressive decision last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague — to reject the claim submitted by Serbia that Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence was unlawful — was mostly either ignored or reported in articles festooned with false alarmism about hypothetical future secessions. Allow this precedent, moaned many, and what is to stop, say, Catalonia from breaking away?

This line of thinking is wrong twice.

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NY Times: Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The Star: Can the upcoming G8/G20 summits still deliver a political win for Prime Minister Stephen Harper in spite of the brand-corroding controversies that have led up to them? If the events of the past few weeks are any indication, the answer is a cautious yes. That is not to say that the road that led to this month’s summits has not been a rocky one for Harper or that he will not have lasting bruises to show for his government’s stumbles along the way.

NY Times: BP engineers struggled Friday to plug a gushing oil well a mile under the sea, but as of late in the day they had made little headway in stemming the flow. Amid mixed messages about problems and progress, the effort — called a “top kill” — continued for a third day, with engineers describing a painstaking process of trying to plug the hole, using different weights of mud and sizes of debris like golf balls and tires, and then watching and waiting. They cannot use brute force because they risk making the leak worse if they damage the pipes leading down to the well.