Tony Blair (or the Winston Churchill of our times, as he was known in the Bush White House) is not going to be the first president of the European Union. And Iceland is not going to join the EU either.
"The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There's no point in interpreting this otherwise," Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan said last Friday week.
This is how the human race does business. What the G8 summit in Italy decided to do about climate change last week was much less than is necessary, but the very best that a realist could have hoped for.
Speaking in Moscow on July 7, President Barack Obama was the very soul of reasonableness.
"The Dalai Lama equals non-violence, and without him there would be violence," said Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, a couple of months ago.
Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, has declared that any attack on his country's embassy in Honduras will lead to war between the two nations, and I can't help wishing that the Hondurans would call his bluff.
The grisly video of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan dying in a Teheran street, shot down by a government thug, has already been seen by millions of Iranians.
By the end of this month, all United States military forces will have withdrawn from Iraqi cities. Effectively, the US war in Iraq is over. Was it worth it?
In the old Soviet Union, the future was always certain; only the past was liable to change without notice.
The rules for street demos are different in Iran. Even in the most oppressive states the rulers know that outbursts of popular anger should be contained with as little violence as possible, but elsewhere the authorities always see deadly force as the final resort.
Foreigners look at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, see a ridiculous old goat with megalomaniacal tendencies and a history of white-collar crime, and wonder why so many Italians keep voting for him.
It was a good speech by any measure, and it will go some way towards lessening the mistrust of the world's Muslims towards the United States.
It would be child's play to take out North Korea's nuclear facilities in a single co-ordinated strike. The North Korean air force is not modern enough to stop United States or Russian or even Chinese strike aircraft.
"The war is not going to end soon," said Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the Sri Lankan army's spokesman, last month.
Why are Koreans so much braver than Israelis when faced with the threat of nuclear weapons?
It is not nice to say "I told you so," but this time has to be an exception.
We seem to have got away with it this time. The swine flu turned out not to be a global killer, at least not in this first go-round. But we have had a fright, and maybe we should learn something from it.
In the past two years, various non-African countries - China, India, South Korea, Britain and the Arab Gulf states lead the pack - have been taking over huge tracts of farmland in Africa by lease or purchase, to produce food or biofuels for their own use.
At the time of writing, almost a week after we all learned that a lethal new strain of influenza had appeared in Mexico, every single death attributed to swine flu has been Mexican, and all but one of those deaths happened in Mexico itself.
The great virtue of a maverick such as Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is that there is none of the usual pussy-footing around.
