The British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, pressed Israel to re-embrace the road map to peace on a visit to Jerusalem on Wednesday. But although diplomats said there were signs of greater Israeli flexibility since the death of Yasser Arafat, its foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, repeated that the Palestinians must first ”end terror”.

England’s tour to Zimbabwe was on the brink of cancellation on Wednesday night after David Morgan, the chairperson of the England and Wales Cricket Board, instructed Michael Vaughan’s team not to board a flight to Harare an hour before it was scheduled to leave Johannesburg.

The United States on Wednesday night raised the stakes in Ukraine’s election crisis when Colin Powell, the secretary of state, insisted that Washington would not accept the official result and threatened to ostracise the Russian-backed regime. His intervention, which sets the Bush administration on a collision course with Moscow, came as the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, called for a nationwide strike.

They just don’t make ’em like they used to. This week, it took the grey-haired man in the purple cassock to crystallise the national psyche, with all its imperfections and its challenges, perfectly. With the benefit of wisdom and age, Archbishop Desmond Tutu made clear his love for his "rainbow nation" — and then he laid right in. It had, he argued, by and large become the sycophantic nation.

Yet again, we’re approaching the cold and clinically prepared marketing scam known as Christmas, when the public are conned into buying rubbish they don’t need, conned into expecting positive emotions they won’t experience, and deliberately manipulated into getting deeper into debt. Here’s a good idea, though: browse through the pix — and the police reports — at <i>Santarchy!</i>

President George W Bush’s foreign policy is simple: don’t mess with the United States. The same, it appears, applies to economic policy. Last Friday, the dollar fell sharply against the euro following comments by Federal Reserve chairperson Alan Greenspan, which — by his own cryptic standards — were unambiguous. ”It seems persuasive that, given the size of the US current account deficit, a diminished appetite for adding to dollar balances must occur at some point,” Greenspan said.

Driving through western Ukraine on a hot spring day in the mid-1990s, I passed an idyllic scene. Scores of Ukrainian army conscripts lay around a radar antenna, sound asleep in the rich long grass and flowers, soaking up the sun, expressions of pure serenity on their faces. Now, however, it is worth remembering how many times, and with how little fuss and blood, Ukraine has stepped back from the brink before.