Like most heraldry, the global tour of the Olympic torch is a modern invention, stretching back no further in the mists of time than the last Games in Athens. After London, Paris and San Francisco, prising the torch from the phalanx of the Chinese robocops protecting it has become the latest Olympic sport.

The Casa Poporului is the unfinished work of one of Europe’s last megalomaniacs, Nicolae Ceausescu. Much of historic Bucharest was levelled to create a building that the Romanian dictator could boast of as the largest in the world. An odd choice of summit venue for Nato, which tries to define itself as much by shared democratic values as it does by brute force.

Ten months after he came barnstorming to power, Nicolas Sarkozy is in some trouble. The tactician who sapped the strength of the French left by offering right-wing socialists a seat in his government or on the International Monetary Fund is now finding his own weaponry used against him.

Retired justice Eliyahu Winograd, who headed the panel investigating Israel’s 34-day war in Lebanon in 2006, said recently what everybody already knew. The ground offensive launched in the last 60 hours of the war ”did not achieve any military objective, nor did it fulfil its potential”.

If you bottle up 1,5-million people in a territory 40km long and 10km wide, and turn off the lights, as Israel has done in Gaza, the bottle will burst. This is what happened on Wednesday when tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt to buy food, fuel and supplies after militants destroyed two-thirds of the wall separating the Gaza Strip from Egypt.