Mar 13, 2015 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad as compiled by the Associated Press:

President Obama’s executive order sanctioning some of the worst human-rights violators in Venezuela begins the process of holding individuals accountable for destroying what once was one of the proudest democracies in Latin America.

By itself, the order naming seven officials won’t stop President Nicolás Maduro’s regime from systematically harassing, beating and jailing members of the opposition. But it puts the bullies on notice that there is a price to pay for their actions.

The not-so-magnificent seven in President Obama’s executive order include officials in the intelligence service, national guard, public ministry and armed services. They are prohibited from entering the United States, and U.S. citizens are prohibited from doing business with them.

It is worth asking at this point how individuals supposedly working for “the people” and “socialism” in a country whose currency is increasingly worthless have accumulated the wherewithal to own valuable assets, possibly real estate, in the United States, and why they would need to visit “the empire” they so detest.

The White House order is unlikely to improve the relationship between the United States and Venezuela, but for that the Maduro regime can only blame itself. Washington has been silent too long as the government denies Venezuelan citizens the human rights to which they are entitled.

Years before big technology companies like Google and Facebook began talking about using balloons, drones and cellphones to provide Internet access to billions of people in developing countries, leaders like President Bill Clinton were talking about bridging the “global digital divide.”

And while progress has been made in recent years, most of the world’s 7.2 billion people still do not have access to the Internet.

The good news is that most of humanity now lives within reach of wireless networks. About half of the world’s population, or 3.6 billion people, had cellphone service last year, up from 2.3 billion people in 2008. And one-third of all people used mobile networks to connect to the Internet last year. Two main forces have made this possible: rising incomes in developing countries and cheaper wireless devices and service.

The most important thing world leaders can do to make the Internet available to more people is to pursue faster and more equitable economic growth. At the same time, improving access itself can help economies grow by making knowledge more widely available. There are numerous private efforts under way that aim to make Internet access universal.

Bridging the digital divide is not quite as daunting as it once seemed. But neither is progress moving fast enough to allow billions of people to use a communications system that has become indispensable to the modern economy.

A year after Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went missing, shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board, the search operation and theories as to how and where it was lost are far from over.

One year ago, from Kula Lumpur to Ho Chi Minh and from Cambodia to Indonesia, all aviation gurus manning the skies were aware of the aircraft’s deviated path – at some point of time on that day – but were clueless as to how to spot it and fly rescue missions. That is why the mystery lives on, propelling conspiracy theories as to whether it was hijacked, developed an unknown technical fault and lost contact, or the pilot committed suicide by flying it down in the ocean. Ironically, no amount of scientific projections and calculations has succeeded in finding the debris. Neither any wreckage nor any fuselage has emerged.