Russian politician Andrei Zhirinovsky is all mouth, so it would not normally have caused a stir when he suggested earlier this year that Russia should simply annex the parts of neighbouring Kazakhstan that have a large Russian population.
When news got out that United States President Barack Obama and China's President Xi Jinping had reached an agreement on climate change, the American blogosphere lit up with negative comments.
''The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some say that it has already begun,'' said Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union and the man who inadvertently administered a mercy killing to Communism in Europe.
In China, the communists had just massacred the students in Tiananmen Square and won themselves another quarter-century in power.
The European Union's decision-making processes lend new depth to the word ''incoherent'' and the current British Government's default mode is nastiness, but they have both outdone themselves this time.
''We would like to get to a prototype in five generations,'' said Dr Thomas McGuire, the director of the ''revolutionary technology'' division at Lockheed Martin's famed Skunk Works.
''The price of oil will hit its floor and it will rise again,'' President Nicolas Maduro assured Venezuelans, whose shaky economy depends critically on a high oil price.
To nobody's great surprise, Bolivia's President Evo Morales has won a third five-year term by a landslide majority.
There was a time, as recently as 25 years ago, when military staff colleges around the world taught a reasonably effective doctrine for dealing with terrorism.
'We have to recognise that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it's not America's responsibility to make it one,'' said President Barack Obama last May.
A coalition of imams and organisations representing British Muslims has written to Prime Minister David Cameron asking him to stop using the phrase ''Islamic State'' when talking about the new country carved out of Iraq and Syria by Islamist terrorists.
You mustn't expect politicians in a democratic system to come up with ideologically pure, intellectually consistent policies.
The last time ''Mare Nostrum'' (Latin for ''Our Sea'') was used as a political slogan in Italy, Mussolini's fascists were claiming dominance over the entire Mediterranean.
After half a century of stasis, there are big new strategic realities in the Middle East, but people are having trouble getting their heads around them.
Ebola is a truly frightening disease, with a fatality rate as high as 95% (although the death rate in the current outbreak in West Africa is only 55%-60%).
Losing a war could be a bad thing, but the obvious solution to that problem was to be very good at war.
Two high-profile incidents occurred last week, at opposite ends of the Arab world.
As the Russian-backed rebels abandoned almost all their positions in eastern Ukraine apart from the two regional capital cities, Donetsk and Luhansk, the various players made predictable statements.
Only a very bad novelist would dare to write a scenario as simplistic as the current presidential election in Indonesia.
''Listen to your caliph and obey him. Support your state, which grows every day,'' said Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, announcing the rebirth of the caliphate in the broad territory between Aleppo in northern Syria and Diyala province in eastern Iraq.