You have heard what the learned judge, Lord Justice Leveson, has said in his extensive, 2,000-page summing up, having heard the evidence in the case of The People v The Press.

It is now your task to consider your verdict, not, as you would usually do, on the defendant in the dock, but on m'learned friend himself, His Honour Lord Justice Leveson.

Allow me to assist you, before you retire to the jury room to consider what you have heard. For this is a complex, and in some ways, a puzzling case, unlike any which has come before a jury in this court room before.

First, I would suggest, you will want to consider what His Honour said in regard to the general behaviour of some elements of the Press: "There has been a recklessness in prioritising sensational stories, almost irrespective of the harm that the stories may cause and the rights of those who would be affected ..." (Executive Summary, para. 32)

You will recall also, members of the jury, that the learned judge remarked that "when the story is just too big and the public appetite too great, there has been significant and reckless disregard for accuracy ... a cultural tendency within parts of the press vigorously to resist or dismiss complainants almost as a matter of course." (para. 38/9)

I am sure I do not need to remind you what His Honour suggested as a remedy for these disgraceful lapses: an entirely new system of what he called "independent self-regulation", underpinned by new legislation. And you cannot fail to remember his insistence that "this is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of the press." (para 73)

Members of the jury, there are two charges brought against the learned judge. First, that in proposing a legislative under-pinning for his new system of independent self-regulation, he is, in the words of the prime minister, Mr Cameron, "crossing a Rubicon", by which I take it he means moving too far from the hitherto hallowed principle that the Press must remain unfetttered and free from improper political pressure.

The second charge is that the learned judge has failed to take sufficient account of the role of the police in considering the truly appalling events surrounding the illegal hacking of voicemail messages, especially of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

In his consideration of the relationship between certain officers and the News of the World newspaper, he concludes: "I have seen no basis for challenging at any stage the integrity of the police, or that of the senior police officers concerned." He adds, however, that there was, in relation to the investigation of the allegations of phone-hacking, "a series of poor decisions, poorly executed." (para 78)

On the issue of corruption, Lord Justice Leveson says: "The Inquiry has not unearthed extensive evidence of police corruption nor is there evidence ... that significant numbers of police officers lack integrity ... The notion, as a matter of established fact, that this may be a widespread problem is not borne out. The scale of the problem needs to be kept in proportion." (para 91)

Members of the jury, I now have to ask you to consider your verdict. On Count One, do you find His Honour Lord Justice Leveson guilty or not guilty of seeking to embark on a dangerous path towards State control of the Press?

On Count Two, do you find him guilty or not guilty of underplaying the role of the police in the events that led to the setting up of his Inquiry?

Finally, so that there may be no possible misunderstanding, I should emphasise that I make no allegations myself. I merely present them to you in the spirit of encouraging an informed and dispassionate discussion of the issues involved.

The people of Catalonia, the richest region of Spain, will be voting on Sunday in an election which may - and I repeat, may - set them on a path to independence.

Just like Scotland, you may think. Well, no, not really. First because the central government in Madrid is most unlikely to give its approval for the holding of a referendum on Catalan independence, and second because, if the opinion polls are right, there is in Catalonia, unlike in Scotland, a pro-independence majority.

And that's something new. Last September, on Catalonia's national day, huge crowds took to the streets of Barcelona - some estimates put the number as high as two million - to call for independence in an unprecedented demonstration of fury at what is seen here as Madrid's contemptuous, even insulting, attitude towards the people of this immensely proud nation.

In part, this nationalist fervour is a by-product of the European economic crisis. Catalans contribute substantially more to Madrid's coffers than they get back, and, they claim, are being asked to make far bigger financial sacrifices than the central government to meet the demands of Spain's creditors.

Last night, I stood in a magnificent square in the heart of old Barcelona, gazing up at an eternal flame flickering at the top of a soaring metal sculpture. It's a memorial to the Catalan fighters who died fighting to defend the city in 1714, against the besieging Spanish and French armies. Catalan nationalists will tell you that today, nearly 300 years later, they're still fighting for the same cause.

Like their Scottish nationalist equivalents, Catalan independence campaigners insist that their new nation would remain a member of the EU and would be a good neighbour to the country from which it had broken away.

One businessman here told me the relationship between Madrid and Barcelona is like a marriage that has irretrievably failed. But when I asked him if divorce is really the only answer, he replied that unfortunately one of the parties to the marriage is refusing to consider one. Madrid, he said, is simply unable to accept the reality of a partnership that has broken down.

The reason all this matters far beyond Spain's borders is that the Catalans are not the only Europeans itching to form their own independent state. Quite apart from those Scots who favour independence, what about the Corsicans of France, or the Padanians of northern Italy? They will all be watching closely on Sunday.

It's not as if the EU isn't facing enough troubles as it is. There's the new budget to be agreed, and of course there's still a very real prospect of more financial turbulence over Greece's debts and, yes, Spain's too.

The last thing the Spanish government wants is to be thrown into a major constitutional crisis following this weekend's election. Catalan leaders insist they're not spoiling for a fight, but they are insisting on being heard.

If the election results in a clear majority in the regional parliament for parties that favour either full independence or substantially enhanced autonomy - and that's what the opinion polls are suggesting - the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, will be faced with a stark choice.
Either he starts negotiating with the Catalans to see how many of their demands he can meet, or he faces them down and dares them to do their worst.

Right across Europe, many of his fellow EU leaders will be watching anxiously to see which way he jumps.

I'll be on air tonight, Friday, from Barcelona, with an extended report looking ahead to the election and analysing the likely repercussions for the rest of the EU. I hope you'll be able to tune in, or catch up later via iPlayer.

It was a time when Israeli and Palestinian officials would sit down and negotiate, not very successfully, admittedly, but in the hope that they might be able to find a way to resolve their many deep-seated differences about how to share the bit of the Levant that they both call their homeland.

Last night, in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel, many thousands of people, Palestinians and Israelis, lay awake in their beds, listening for -- and dreading -- the sound of an incoming missile or rocket. There is no peace process any more, nor has there been for several years; in its place there is either a vacuum, or war.

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo peace accords, a moment when, just briefly, many Israelis and Palestinians believed there might be a chance of coming up with a way to live in peace, side by side.

The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (together with Israelis Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin) and took up residence in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He died eight years ago, and now they're digging up his body to see if he was poisoned by the Israelis.

Why did the Palestinian group Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip for the past five years, unleash a barrage of more than 100 rockets against Israel last weekend? Why did Israel choose to respond with its most violent military onslaught since its war in Gaza four years ago?

According to the analyst Hussein Ibish, of the American Task Force on Palestine, whom I interviewed on the programme last night, Hamas hardliners needed to prove that they still have the stomach for a fight, even after five years of trying to be a quasi government, looking after sewers, and power supplies, and health and education. And perhaps they also wanted to force their Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Cairo to come off the fence and back them as the legitimate representatives of their people.

As for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Daniel Levy of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who was also on last night's programme, with an election coming in January, Mr Netanyahu may well have caculated that a short, sharp military adventure would do him no harm at all at the polls. It will certainly divert voters' attention from Israel's deep religious-secular divide, which has been a dominant political theme for the past year.

If this all sounds cynical, well, I'm sorry, but there's more to come. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz says the Hamas military commander whom the Israelis killed on Wednesday, Ahmed al-Jaabari, had been for several years Israel's go-to man in Gaza. Apparently, he was the man who kept the rockets on their launchers, who kept the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit alive, and who eventually, just over a year ago, negotiated Shalit's return to Israel in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

According to Ha'aretz, Israel eventually decided that Jaabari was no longer fulfilling his side of the bargain: too many rockets were once again being fired from Gaza into Israel. The message, said Ha'aretz, was simple and clear: "You failed -- you're dead."

So now what? Well, we know the script, unfortunately, because we've watched this drama many times before. Over the next few days -- maybe a week, maybe two -- more people on both sides will die. More people will live in fear, and more will have reason to hate their adversaries.

Eventually, a ceasefire will be agreed. Israel will say it has largely destroyed the Hamas arsenal of rockets and has seriously weakened its military capacity. Hamas will say it has withstood yet another onslaught by its far more powerful enemy, and will salute the resolve and steadfastness of the Palestinian people.

I remember asking a senior Israeli peace negotiator many years ago if he thought the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians would ever end. "Oh yes," he said. "It will end when we grow tired of killing each other's children."

That time, it seems, has not yet come.

Or was it the African-Americans? Or the young voters? Or the women? As always in elections, the numbers tell the story. Barack Obama won 71 per cent of the Latino vote, 93 per cent of the black vote, 60 per cent of the youth vote, and 55 per cent of the women's vote (67 per cent of unmarried women).

Mitt Romney got most of the white votes, and did best among older, white males. The problem for the Republicans, though, is crystal clear: there aren't enough white voters any more to bring them victory -- they now make up just 73 per cent of the total electorate, down from 77 per cent eight years ago, and the numbers are falling further year by year.

Ten per cent of American voters are Hispanic; 13 per cent are black; 20 per cent are under the age of 30. No party can win without their support. As one Republican strategist put it after the results were in: "Demography is destiny."

But here's another statistic that I found particularly telling: 81 per cent of voters who said they were backing the candidate who "cares about people like me" went for Obama. In other words, to win an election, you have to be able to persuade voters that you understand them, their problems and their worries.

They don't have to like you -- Margaret Thatcher, for example, never did well in the "likeability" polls, but she did speak a language that resonated with large numbers of British voters. That's why she won three consecutive elections. And that, the numbers suggest, was a major factor in Barack Obama's re-election victory on Tuesday night.

By the way, while we're on the subject of numbers, I would urge you to take with a large pinch of salt all the stuff that's been written this week about America being more deeply split down the middle than ever before. The numbers tell a different story.

Barack Obama won 50.4 per cent of the popular vote on Tuesday. Compare that to the 50.7 per cent George Bush won in 2004, the same proportion that Ronald Reagan won in 1980, or the pencil-thin 50.08 per cent majority that Jimmy Carter won in 1976.

The truth is that the US has been split down the middle for decades. Which means that you need only a small number of voters to shift allegiance -- or for the country's demographic make-up to change (see above) -- for the White House to change hands.

So is it all over for the Republican party? I doubt it -- after all, just eight years ago, George W Bush won 40 per cent of the Hispanic vote, and with a number of rising Hispanic stars in their ranks, there would appear to be no real reason why Republicans can't start working to rebuild some of that support between now and the next Presidential election in 2016.

Those of you with long memories may remember how during the 1980s and early 90s, after eight years of Reagan, followed by four years of Bush Senior, it became fashionable to say the Democrats would never win an election again. Then along came a man called Bill Clinton, younger, cooler, and saxophone-playing, who turned the Democrats into the New Democrats, and charmed his way to the White House.

Something remarkably similar happened in the UK -- Labour was frequently written off during the Thatcher years, but then along came a man called Tony Blair, younger, cooler, and guitar-playing, who turned Labour into New Labour, and charmed his way to Downing Street.

(A Clinton strategist at the time was reported to have told Labour what the secret of the Clinton makeover had been: "Keynesianism, plus the electric chair.")

History teaches us that parties can re-invent themselves to match changing social realities. So here's a mini-prediction for you: keep an eye on Spanish-speaking Republicans, men like Marco Rubio of Florida, who may very well play an increasingly visible role over the next couple of years.

And here's one other mini-prediction: I doubt the Republicans will ever again choose a multi-millionaire venture capitalist as their Presidential candidate.

I still remember the words of a retired factory worker in deepest rural Ohio, whom I met during my recent US road trip: "As long as rich men run this country, it'll be a rich man's country. And they won't do anything for people like me."

In fact, the two questions amount to the same thing, following a resolution passed by the UN security council last week that could well pave the way for military intervention in a country that's rapidly becoming one of the world's most troubling security hot-spots.

Here's the background: last March, there was a military coup in Mali. In the words of Bruce Whitehouse, writing in the London Review of Books: "Rank-and-file soldiers involved in a campaign against the resurgent Tuareg rebels didn't trust their commanders and accused officials in [the capital] Bamako of withholding equipment and support. Mutineers captured the state television station and stormed the presidential palace. [President Amadou Toumani] Touré vanished into the night with a few bodyguards ..."

And here's the background to those Tuareg rebels: they've been fighting for independence for the north of the country for many years. Some of them fought for Muammar Gaddafi in Libya; and after his overthrow last year, they returned home with plenty of arms. After the coup, they did try to secede, but were soon overpowered by Islamist/jihadist groups, reportedly linked to al-Qaeda, with whom they had been in a loose alliance.

So now, half the country or more, including the famed city of Timbuktu, is in the hands of the Islamists. And Western governments are desperately worried that al-Qaeda is well on the way to establishing a new toe-hold in a newly-failed state.

With some rare exceptions (take a bow, Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News and Mike Thomson of our sister programme Today), much of this has gone unreported in the mainstream Western media. But the UN security council has begun to take notice, and the resolution passed a week ago, drafted by France, calls on Mali's neighbours to come up with "detailed and actionable recommendations" within 45 days for military intervention.

It also calls on foreign governments and international organisations to provide "co-ordinated assistance, expertise, training and capacity-building support" to such a force. All of which means, in all likelihood, Nigerian troops, backed by French special forces and perhaps some US intelligence-gathering as well.

Does any of this sound familiar? Think Somalia, where after endless delays, African Union forces are now beginning to make real gains against the al-Shabaab militia groups, which like their Malian equivalents, are said to be allied to al-Qaeda.

So will it work in Mali, if it ever happens? (It needs another security council resolution before a force can actually move in.) The Malian army itself is reportedly nothing like an effective fighting force, so there will have to be a lot of careful thinking about what should be done post-intervention. (Iraq, anyone?)

The respected conflict resolution think-tank the International Crisis Group has already sounded a warning:

"The use of force may well be necessary ... to neutralise some of the armed groups involved in transnational crime activities combining terrorism, jihadism and drug trafficking. However, any military intervention should be preceded by political and diplomatic efforts aimed at isolating questions regarding intercommunal tensions within Malian society from those concerning collective security of the Sahel-Sahara region."

There are already some grim tales emerging from the areas under the control of the Islamists: the UN's assistant secretary-general for human rights Ivan Simonovic told reporters after a recent visit to Mali that he had heard testimony that forced marriage, forced prostitution, and rape were widespread, and that women were being sold as "wives" for less than $1,000.

Islamist militia groups have stoned to death an unmarried couple, he said, and amputated the hand of an alleged thief, as well as destroying ancient shrines in Timbuktu, claiming they violated Sharia law and promoted idolatry among Muslims. (Three more shrines, all listed as World Heritage Sites, were reported to have been destroyed yesterday.)

After all the mistakes that have been made during previous attempts at international military intervention, I wouldn't expect anything to happen quickly in Mali. But it may well be that sooner or later, a force will move in.

The New York-based artist Janet Goldner, who knows Mali well, wrote on her blog last week: "I have been a peace activist all my life but I see no alternative to a war in this case. The humanitarian crisis will only get worse until the criminals are gone."

It's the Brent Spence bridge, and it spans the Ohio river, linking the state of Ohio to the north with Kentucky to the south. And according to US safety officials, less than 50 years after it was built, it is now "functionally obsolete".

It carries more than twice as much traffic as it was designed for, it has no emergency lanes for vehicles that have broken down, and its traffic lanes are too narrow.

Accidents are frequent - I saw a car that had smashed into the side of the bridge when I drove across just a few days ago, causing chaos as police struggled to remove it - and there have been at least two fatalities in the past two years.

"Every day when I get across, I breathe a sigh of relief," Sarah told me. "I'm closer to where I need to be, and I'm safer."

The Brent Spence bridge is just one example of a problem that is of increasing concern to the US - its crumbling infrastructure. Roads, bridges, ports and airports -- many are in desperate need of repair or replacement - and the resulting delays are costing the nation billions of dollars a year.

(The Brent Spence bridge is estimated to cost an annual 80-90 million dollars in traffic delays - because the I-75 interstate highway that it carries is one of the country's main north-south arteries. More than $400 billion worth of freight crosses the bridge every year.)

So why don't they build a new bridge? Simple answer: because they can't agree on who should pay for it. The present one was built mainly with funds from the Federal government in Washington - but there's no cash available from that source any more, and neither Kentucky nor Ohio much like the idea of picking up the tab themselves.

None of this would matter very much to people outside the immediate region, perhaps, if it wasn't a typical example of a much wider problem. The US has long been the world's dominant economy, a global leader in manufacturing and technological innovation - but the question is for how much longer?

Consider this: each year, the US turns out something like 100,000 newly qualified engineers. They're the ones who build the roads and the bridges. India and China, on the other hand, each produce a million new engineers, which means they have a lot more people available to build that all-important infrastructure without which no developed economy can prosper.

If you want to take a gloomy view of America's economic future, you could point to its continuing sluggish economy, an education system that isn't producing anything like enough mathematicians and scientists, and a corporate environment in which cash for research and development may soon start drying up as CEOs worry whether steady growth will ever return.

On the other hand, if you come to Atlanta, Georgia, where I spent the day yesterday, you'll find plenty of people at the Georgia Institute of Technology who are full of hope for the future. Lots of new ideas are bubbling away, they say - new materials to replace steel, new ways of producing cleaner energy, even new ways to produce robots with a sense of music - and yes, there's still money to fund the research.

Next Tuesday, we'll be broadcasting a special programme to explore some of these themes, with the help of a panel of experts at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC. It'll include my report from the Brent Spence bridge, and later in the week, we hope to broadcast my report from Georgia Tech.

Meanwhile, if you're on Facebook, do take a look at The World Tonight Facebook page, where you can see some wonderful photos from our travels in Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia, taken by producer and ace photographer Dan Isaacs.

With just a few exceptions, I've been to at least one of them pretty much every year for the past two decades -- so it does feel a bit odd watching them on the box like everyone else. (Everyone is glued to them, aren't they?)

On the one hand, I won't much miss the windswept, rain-lashed joys of Brighton, Bournemouth and Blackpool (latterly joined by Manchester and Birmingham, which have a better class of hotel but no storm-flecked seas). Nor will I miss the cold fried eggs at breakfast, nor the excessive amounts of instant coffee drunk from polystyrene cups.

But I will miss -- am missing -- the sense of drama that accompanies the party leaders' speeches every year, and the urgent gossip in the bars as activists and aficionados exchange confidences and hatch plots.

Does any of it matter? Perhaps less than it did, simply because party managers have got so much better at managing, and their media advisers have taught them that conferences work best these days as product launches rather than as a genuine forum for debate.

I realised just how much had changed a couple of years ago, when I went to a lunch-time fringe meeting to hear what I thought might be an interesting discussion about future British defence policy. But instead of finding myself among party activists, I soon discovered that every other person in the room was either from a campaign group or was a lobbyist from a defence company. Not a paid-up party member to be seen.

Mind you, even orchestrated party rallies have their uses. Watch who's called to speak -- and who isn't -- and listen carefully for the core messages when the leader does The Speech. There's still a lot to be learned, even if it's probably true that most of it can be gleaned just as satisfactorily by watching it on TV.

Will you permit me a brief stroll down memory lane? To those drama-packed days of the early 1990s, when the then Labour leader John Smith pushed through OMOV (one member, one vote) to clip the wings of the trades union barons. And when John Prescott delivered an utterly incoherent, barn-storming speech in which, as was remarked at the time, you couldn't understand a word he said, but you knew exactly what he meant.

And to Iain Duncan Smith in Bournemouth in 2002, when he tried to turn his weakness into strength with the much derided line: "Do not under-estimate the determination of a quiet man." A year later, in Blackpool, he tried again: "The quiet man is here to stay, and he's turning up the volume." Weeks later, he was gone.

The early Blair years were full of conference drama as the new leader remodelled his party -- reinvented it, some said -- with a series of speeches which left some activists bewildered and others bewitched. (I thought I detected a bit of Blair in Nick Clegg at the Lib Dem conference in Brighton this week -- the same ability to tell the party faithful what they don't want to hear, yet somehow get them to cheer nonetheless.)

Party policy doesn't get made at conferences any more, and party splits are kept carefully hidden from view. Can you imagine a senior party figure storming off the platform in protest against his leader's speech, as Labour's Eric Heffer did in 1985, when Neil Kinnock went on the attack against Militant?

So yes, I accept that the conferences are not what they were. (The same is true in the US, incidentally, where party conventions used to be the place where, every four years, party activists chose whom they wanted as their presidential candidate. These days, the choice is made in primary elections, so much of the drama has gone.)

And while we're on the subject of the US, that's where I'll be heading next week. So as Labour meet in Manchester, and the Tories gather in Birmingham a week later, I'll be on the other side of the Atlantic. Listen out for a special programme next Thursday, and another one on Monday 15 October, with, I hope, plenty of other reports along the way.

Maybe not. Maybe you were still in paroxysms of post-Paralympic perfection, or mired in Murray-mania -- or perhaps, yesterday morning, you were simply numbed by the horror of the long-awaited Hillsborough report.

So let me draw your attention to matters European, because dull though they may seem, they are still likely to dominate much of the political debate between now and the end of the year.

First, on Wednesday morning, the German constitutional court said OK to the eurozone's financial bail-out plan, without which there was little hope of restoring even a smidgin of stability to EU economies. (True, the court imposed a few conditions, but as is the way with these things, no one worries about the conditions until later.)

Then, on Wednesday night, as results started trickling in from the Dutch general election, it became clear that voters had turned away from the parties at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and decided to stay where they seem to be most comfortable: in the pro-EU middle.

There seems to be a bit of a pattern emerging in European elections these days: first, the opinion polls suggest that voter support is growing rapidly for anti-EU parties on the fringes, but then, on election day, the actual result favours the more traditional parties of the centre.

In May, that's largely what happened in the French presidential election; then the following month in Greece, the anti-austerity Syriza bloc was narrowly beaten at the last minute by the right-of-centre New Democracy party -- and this week in the Netherlands, the two pro-EU centrist parties both did better than expected, with the anti-EU Freedom Party of Geert Wilders losing many of its seats.

You may be familiar with the old maxim about how financial markets work: driven either by greed, or by fear. When greed dominates, traders buy and markets rise; when it gives way to fear, they sell, and markets fall.

So here's the Lustig theory of European election patterns: instead of greed and fear, voters experience anger and fear. When anger dominates, they support anti-EU parties; but when anger gives way to fear, they tend to stick with what they know.

There's no shortage of anger in Europe at the moment: anger at high unemployment, at reckless banking practices, and at ineffectual governments who seem to have spent five long years failing to get to grips with the crisis that has swept across the continent.

But there's fear too: fear of being left out in the cold, if, say, Greece crashes out of the eurozone, or if the Netherlands turns its back on an institution it helped to establish 60 years ago, when it was one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community.

So, sighs of relief in Brussels. But not for long, I fear. Remember Spain?

It's only a week since the European Central Bank announced how it intends to use its muscle to shore up indebted eurozone countries by buying up their bonds if interest rates rise too high. (Not from the governments directly, however, which would be against ECB rules, but only on secondary markets.)

But here come those conditions again: the bank will start buying only if a government asks for help -- and that's something which until now, the Spanish government has insisted it won't do.

Mind you, according to a detailed analysis published by Reuters earlier this week, Spain may soon have little or no choice in the matter. It quoted one analyst as saying: "I think it is a done deal that Spain will seek assistance. They didn't raise nearly enough money in the markets in August and in fact I would argue that they are not even trying to avoid assistance at this point."

We'll probably know soon enough. Spain needs to refinance 27.5 billion euros worth of debt next month -- and the credit rating agencies seem to be just waiting for that formal request for assistance.

If it comes, and if the ECB rescue plan kicks in -- and works -- there'll be more sighs of relief in Brussels. If not, well, let's not go there.

Oh, did you ask about Greece? Good question ... but not this week.

But perhaps they should have done, because they desperately need Washington's attention, and they don't seem to be getting much of it. And until the November elections are out of the way, I very much doubt that will change.

It always used to be said that nothing ever happened in the Middle East unless the US was directly involved. It was never quite as true as people liked to make out (the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, for example, were signed in 1993 with only minimal involvement of the Americans).

It's certainly not true any longer, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world, who decided to take their fate into their own hands and launch the Arab Spring.

And yet. If you want effective international diplomatic action -- and even more so if you want effective international military action -- you still need Washington. With US eyes off the ball, having given up on the UN playing any useful role in Syria, it looks as if there's a huge gap waiting to be filled.

Enter stage right and stage left President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt and prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Both think they can increase their regional influence by playing an active role in Syria, but both are already running into trouble.

Take Mr Erdogan first. Once he was President Bashar al-Assad's friendly neighbour to the north, keen to do business and not too bothered about the niceties of democratic governance in Damascus.

But shortly after the uprising began, he threw in his lot with the anti-Assad protesters, called on the Syrian president to stand down, and was soon hosting tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and, below the radar, offering assistance to Syrian rebel forces.

Now there are 80,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey, and Mr Erdogan is calling Syria a "terrorist state", blaming President Assad for stirring up trouble among Turkey's Kurdish minority. There's certainly been a sharp upsurge in attacks by the Kurdish PKK guerrilla group, which is regarded as a terrorist organisation not only by Ankara, but also by the US and the European Union.

Just this week, there have been reports of major clashes between Turkish forces and PKK fighters, involving a reported 2,000 Turkish troops and including military action across the border in Iraq. How long, some observers are asking, before Turkish forces cross into Syria in hot pursuit of their PKK foes?

As for President Morsi of Egypt, he's playing a very different game. As a man of the Muslim Brotherhood, he's keen to make common cause with the Sunni majority in Syria, who make up the bulk of the anti-Assad forces. He's also keen to show his Arab neighbours that after 30 years of Hosni Mubarak's staunch loyalty to the US, Egypt is now charting its own, independent foreign policy.

But his first attempt to carve out a role for himself in the Syria crisis was short-lived. At the summit of the non-aligned movement in Tehran last month, he hoped to broker a new diplomatic initiative which would include Iran, as Syria's most loyal ally, and the Arab states of the Gulf which have been backing the Syria rebels.

To be a broker, though, you have to command the respect of both sides. And Mr Morsi's strongly-worded attack on President Assad infuriated not only Damascus but also Tehran. End of Morsi initiative.

So what are we left with? Washington engrossed in an election campaign for the next two months; an Egypt still trying to find its feet on the diplomatic stage; and a Turkey becoming seriously alarmed at the risk of blow-back, having dumped President Assad so early on.

Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of a million Syrians are estimated to have fled to neighbouring countries -- most of them to Jordan -- and the level of casualties in Syria is higher than at any point since the uprising began.

Turkish calls for a buffer zone on Syrian soil to offer some protection to Syrian non-combatants seem likely to go nowhere, for the simple reason that buffer zones need military protection, and no one looks ready to send troops to Syria.

No wonder the new international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who has now taken over from Kofi Annan, calls his mission "nearly impossible".

Last night, Mitt Romney, in accepting the Republican party's nomination as challenger to Barack Obama, asked the same question -- knowing full well that for many American voters, in the midst of a prolonged economic slow-down, the answer is a resounding No.

Remember Sarah Palin, in that brief moment when it looked as if she might become the Republican party's standard-bearer? She used to ask the same question in a folksier, but perhaps even more potent, way: "How's that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?"

Because of course hope and change is exactly what Barack Obama did offer four years ago -- and for many American voters, the hopes of 2008 have become the disappointments of 2012.

As Mitt Romney put it last night: "Hope and change had a powerful appeal. But ... if you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn't you feel that way now that he's President Obama? You know there's something wrong with the kind of job he's done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him."

The US is still, despite everything, the biggest economy in the world. The man who sits in the Oval Office makes decisions that reverberate far beyond the US's shores. That's why, every four years, some people outside the US ask: "Shouldn't we all get a vote?"

The US opinion polls suggest that this year's election will be a close one. It's rare for presidents to be defeated after serving just one term (Jimmy Carter in 1980 and the first President Bush in 1992 are the most recent exceptions), but no one is taking it for granted that Barack Obama will still be in the White House next January.

It would be a different story if the rest of the world did have a vote, although it's true that national leaders are often far more popular overseas than at home (Margaret Thatcher was the prime UK example). According to one recent poll, 87 per cent of German voters, 86 per cent of French voters, 80 per cent of British voters, and 74 per cent of Japanese voters have confidence in Obama -- and large majorities want to see him re-elected.

Part of Mitt Romney's appeal to American voters is that he will be a tougher President than Obama. He believes, as he put it last night, that "when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American."

He didn't mention Afghanistan or Iraq, but he did mention Iran, and he warned Russia and China that he'd be tougher on them too. (I couldn't help noticing, by the way, that he didn't once mention the last Republican president, George W Bush, who seems to have been almost entirely written out of the Republican history books, at least for now.)

It's often said that all that matters in any election is how voters feel about the economy -- and more specifically, about the economic future. In fact, it's more complicated than that, which means that despite the grim economic picture -- and in particular the jobs picture -- Barack Obama is still in with a chance.

For one thing, as Hillary Clinton learned during the Democrats' primary campaign four years ago, he's a supremely effective campaigner. He's also an inspiring speaker, which no one would claim for Mitt Romney. (Mind you, it may be that in 2012 there's less of an appetite for inspiration, and more of an appetite for perspiration.)

The electoral demographics may also be in Obama's favour: women voters, African-Americans, Hispanic voters, all lean towards the Democrats -- and the recent furore over a Republican congressman's remarks about "legitimate rape" will have done nothing to help Romney.

Next week the Democrats will hold their own convention, and after that, it'll be time for the televised presidential debates. I'll be watching, of course, and I'll also to be doing some reporting from the US in the run-up to the election in November.

And, as you may not have noticed amid all the excitement (a gold medal in women's taekwondo? Really? How did that happen? And when did horses start dancing to music?), the government is not a happy bunny. There will be trouble ahead.

David Cameron, as we discovered shortly before we went Olympi-mad, can't deliver on his promise to reform the House of Lords. This week, he gave up trying, which has greatly upset Nick Clegg, who in return says he now won't support proposals to reduce the number of MPs in the House of Commons, which would have been a great help to Mr Cameron.

Remember when we were governed by the TB/GBs? (TB=Tony Blair; GB=Gordon Brown.) Their hate-hate relationship poisoned the machinery of government and did none of us any good. Well, now it's the DC/NCs (DC=David Cameron; NC=Nick Clegg.) Maybe they don't hate each other in that fratricidal way that Blair and Brown did -- but they've certainly fallen out of love.

The lovey-dovey of the Downing Street rose garden in May 2010 is no more than a distant memory. The trust has gone, and neither of the coalition partner leaders believes any more in the ability of the other to keep his promises.

We are not yet half way through what is meant to be a five-year term for the coalition government, yet I sense increasingly that ministerial thoughts are already turning to electoral calculation. The Tories desperately want to win a majority that would allow them to govern without having to rely on those pesky Lib Dems -- and the Lib Dems desperately want to avoid annihilation.

Restive Conservative backbenchers seem to be chafing unhappily from the constraints of coalition, and when they look at what the opinion polls are telling them, they conclude that voters are no longer impressed by their protestations of coalition compromises in the national interest.

So what are they going to do about it? Do I think David Cameron is about to be overthrown by a phalanx of toga-wearing Boris Johnson centurions chanting blood-curling threats in Latin? Of course not. Do I think the Lib Dems are going to throw Nick Clegg to the wolves, in the hope of being able to appeal to the electorate in 2015 without a Clegg albatross around their neck? Er, unlikely, but not impossible.

The point is this: even if you care not a fig for the machinations of Westminster, these guys are responsible for devising policies that may, perhaps, help the UK economy out of the doldrums. If they are at each other's throats all the time, and looking for opportunities to do each other down, it doesn't exactly bode well for the rest of us.

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the euro crisis is still very much with us, even if most of the bankers and traders are on holiday at the moment, and the latest figures on the UK economy (zero growth predicted for 2012, the trade gap at record levels) are pretty grim.

So although much of the country seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the combination of a bit of sunshine and an unexpectedly successful Olympics, it's a pretty safe bet that it won't take long for the smiles to fade. And I'm not expecting to see many smiles on the faces of Mr Cameron or Mr Clegg.

I know the marriage metaphors have been overdone, but I can't help observing that the prime minister and his deputy do look increasingly like a couple trapped in a marriage that's no longer working. If they stay together, it's because they think they'd be worse off separately -- but that doesn't stop them dreaming of it every night.

In his words, we've moved on "from national soul-searching to national celebration in exactly 12 months; from Broken Britain to Team GB."

So how come? Are we the same people, burning down shops in the High Street one minute, then cheering on Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and Bradley Wiggins, plus our rowers and jumpers and gymnasts, the next?

A couple of random thoughts for you: first, wouldn't it be interesting to track down some of the rioters from a year ago and ask them if they're as swept up by Olympic-mania as the rest of us?

And second, perhaps we're a nation of teenagers, subject to extreme mood swings. One moment, it's all: "I hate you, you've ruined my life"; then it's "I love you to bits, you're the best."

We wept over the death of Princess Di; we cheered the wedding of Wills and Kate; then we did a spot of rioting, and now we're glued to the telly-box marvelling at the achievements of Team GB.

Emotional spasms, or a nation so diverse in its make-up that it encompasses all the above, and more?