Let’s start with the surprise visit of the Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev to South Ossetia yesterday. It’s being covered in the Russian daily, Vremya. Russia and Nicaragua are the only countries to consider South Ossetia as an independent republic after it broke away from Georgia with the aid of Russia in the recent Russian Georgian war. Vremia points out that this visit happened on the same day that western countries signed the Nabucco pipeline treaty in Turkey. This is a treaty to create a gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Europe, through the Caucus, completely avoiding Russian territory. Vremia infers that Medvedev’s visit is a way of Russia reaffirming its position and its strength in light of the Nabucco pipeline treaty. “Medvedev feted in South Ossetia,” is the headline in the Moscow Times which says images broadcast on Russians state television showed thousands of cheering Ossetians thronging the streets to welcome the Russian President.

The New York Times picks up on reports in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about CIA plans to assassinate al Qaeda leaders. These plans were hatched in the weeks after 9/11 when a secret Presidential order was signed by George W. Bush authorizing the CIA to catch and kill Al Qaeda operatives around the world. The plan intended to create and train small teams of agents to be sent overseas. However it was never fully carried out officials said. The CIA director Leon Panetta cancelled the program last month. Congressional Democrats are furious that this plan was never shared with House and Senate oversight committees. These committees were created in the 70s in response to disclosures about CIA abuses including plots to assassinate Castro and other foreign politicians. Under Gerald Ford in 1976, an executive order was issued banning assassinations. It’s unclear if this would apply to terrorists however.

In the Israeli press, there is coverage of a controversy over the announcement by the Transport Ministry that they intend to erase the names of Arab Israeli towns on road signs, only keeping the Hebrew terms. We see an example of an Israeli road sign on the website of Ennahar Online. Under this proposal, Jeruslam would no longer be written as “Al Quds” in Arabic letters on Israeli road signs. It would instead be written with the Hebrew pronunciation “Yerushalayim”. For the Israeli news website YNet news, this is an issue of respect. “Arabic names of local towns should be kept on our road signs,” it says. It points out that Arabic is an official language in the State of Israel so why not use the Arabic names. In any case, it adds, few Israelis read Arabic so why not give Israeli Arabs the respect they deserve.

“Did the French revolution ever really end?” asks Lara Marlowe in the Irish Times. “The revolution imbued France with a certain romanticism about rebellion. Public protest is a ritualised, theatrical tradition.” The paradox of this is that since the Revolution, France has always sought a strongman to replace the King – from Napoleon right up to Sarkozy…”The King is dead,” she says, “long live the King!”

To finish - an editorial in the Times of India... While the Indian Army is participating in the French Bastille Day Parade, today’s editorial prefers to focus on cockroaches in restaurants! Recently in an Indian city, engineering students thrashed a restaurant and dragged its owner to the local police station after discovering cockroaches in their dish. “This happens in our dear country all the time,” says the editorial. The journalist says he himself recently found a half-eaten cockroach in one of his dishes. He is highly critical of the state of hygiene in Indian restaurants and quotes a British travel writer, Trevor Fishlock, who once sarcastically wrote that “Indian restaurants must add a cockroach dish to their menus.”