It was a week in which, according to Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian, President Bush "swept aside decades of diplomatic tradition" with his statement that it was now "unrealistic" to expect Israel ever to withdraw fully from the land it occupied during the 1967 war.
The new departure, outlined at a joint press conference with an elated Ariel Sharon, also appeared to many commentators to signal the abandonment of what had appeared to be the previous policy of putting pressure on both sides simultaneously to move towards peace.
Thirteen months after it was announced, the "road map" to peace in the Middle East is now just so much waste paper, wrote Hamburg's Die Zeit. "Yesterday George Bush tore it up before the eyes of the world. His explanation that some Jewish settlements in the West Bank must remain and that a solution of the Middle East conflict must take account of 'demographic realities', that is of Israeli settlement policy, means the end of the road map.
And that certainly also means the end for a long time of any peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians."
Giovanni de Luna in La Stampa of Turin was concerned about the use of private security contractors In Iraq following the killing of Fabrizio Quattrocchi. "He died as a hero," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini had said. "But what kind of hero?" asked de Luna. "One of those who will die for their country?"
The justification of the state, he reminded us, following the political philosopher Hobbes, was that its monopoly of force could be accepted by all and thus guarantee a measure of social peace. If the use of force was privatised, we were back to the era of the warring families of the Renaissance, the Sforzas, Viscontis and Gonzagas, who pursued their own interests and fortunes to the detriment of any notion of the common good.
Today in Baghdad, de Luna argued, business and profits were growing dizzily and the market had seen a tumultuous and uncontrollable development in the absence of any regulatory order, in whose construction no one seemed to be interested. In this "postmodern" war, the vigilante forces employed by private companies were beyond anyone's control.
Spain's new Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, this week reiterated his promise to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq if the UN was not in charge of the country before June 30th, El País reported. The investiture debate on Thursday and Friday, characterised by an unexpected openness and good humour, had reoxygenated the stale air of parliament and signified a certain reconciliation between citizens and politics, the paper said.
"With this capital, Mr Zapatero begins a government to which even the \ PP, keen to engage in combat, must grant the traditional 100 days' honeymoon."
Having turned up the heat on the Beckhams' marriage in the previous week, some of Britain's tabloids felt it was now time to bring out their more gentle, caring side and show some empathy for the couple - well, for Victoria at least.
Linda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail thought many women (or "females" as she called them) would be feeling "an amalgam of compassion and admiration for the way she's coping with grief and relentless savaging". The Daily Express's Judy Finnigan agreed, adding that "to crow over her public humiliation is so unsisterly".
But not everyone, it seemed, was feeling very sisterly. Carole Malone in the Sunday Mirror wrote: "The day was always going to dawn when Victoria's greed, her control-freakery and her power games would come back and bite her on her skinny ass."
The Guardian likes to take a more elevated view and Zoe Williams did not disappoint, somehow managing to extract from all the banality and tawdriness a lesson in social history.
It was foolish, she argued, to think you could bombard people with the message that they must at all costs succeed in the economic marketplace yet expect them to exercise restraint in the sexual one. "It's expecting too much of sex to hold fast to these principles of self-denial, when in every other area, everyone's making like Thatcher, with better hair.
The rigorous practice of lifelong fidelity probably died at about the same time that the coal mines closed, it's just that no one noticed because text messages hadn't been invented." ...
Enda O'Doherty