After a week of uncharacteristic silence, Nicolas Sarkozy vowed there would be no going back on reforms that have triggered nationwide transport strikes. To an Ulster Unionist’s ears, his message would have had a profound resonance: No surrender. Stern rhetoric was met with extreme action. Shortly after he spoke, unidentified saboteurs set fire to kilometres of cabling — further disrupting France’s high-speed rail lines.

Polish democracy grew up on Sunday, when the country’s voters rejected the strident, xenophobic nationalism of Jaroslav Kaczynski. The election mattered not just because it was the first time a generation born after 1989 could vote. Nor because liberal conservative winner Donald Tusk won the strongest mandate of any prime minister in the post-communist era.

Bit by bit, the tensions on the Korean peninsula are easing. This week it was announced that the leaders of north and south would meet for a two-day summit, the first in seven years, later this month. In July, the communist regime shut down its sole nuclear reactor and promised to make a full disclosure of its nuclear programme.

Take five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who are working in an ill-equipped hospital. Accuse them wrongly of infecting 426 children with HIV-contaminated blood. Then lock them up for eight years, torture confessions out of them and sentence them to death, and you end up with a full partnership deal with the European Union.

Alvaro de Soto is not the first experienced diplomat to have entered the Middle East a moderate and to have left it two years later angry at the role of Israel and the United States in subverting the search for peace. Nor will he be the last. In his confidential 53-page report, dated May 5 (just before De Soto stepped down as the United Nations’s Middle East envoy) the former Peruvian foreign minister describes the reality of diplomacy.

When a statesman dies he gets tributes — even from those who suffered most at his hands. The news of Boris Yeltsin’s death on Monday was no sooner out than Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, expressed his condolences to the family of the man who had forced him from office.

The meeting this week in Jerusalem between Condoleezza Rice, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas was the first such three-way encounter since 2003. That might suggest that the prospect of serious negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians has somewhat improved.

One note on Tuesday soured the perfect cadence that greeted North Korea’s decision to shut down its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, and take the first step towards dismantling its nuclear-weapons programme. Characteristically, it was sounded by John Bolton, who has lost his job as United States ambassador to the United Nations, but not his voice.

For six years, with the backing of both houses of a markedly conservative Republican Congress, George W Bush has led an American administration that has played an unprecedentedly negative and polarising role in the world’s affairs. On Tuesday, in the midterm United States congressional elections, American voters rebuffed Bush in spectacular style and with both instant and lasting political consequences.