Even the United States realises it needs the United Nations. The idea popular among neo-conservatives in Washington that the UN was useful only in so far as it did America's will has given way to a wiser understanding, whispered in President Bush's ear by both his new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his best friend Tony Blair, that not all problems in the world can be settled by American might and the authority of the UN has to be upheld even when it reaches disagreeable conclusions.

The most telling demonstration of this has been the UN-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon (and Hezbollah, for which Lebanon is not formally responsible). Israel, with America's backing, wanted to silence Hezbollah's guns and rockets by force, partly for its own security, partly to humiliate Iran and Syria. It failed. Diplomacy centred on the Security Council - with France a key player - succeeded. A strong Lebanese military presence on the Lebanese border, with an even stronger UN force to back it up, will now apply Security Council resolution 1701, which calls for all militia forces to be disarmed for good. Iran emerges unhumiliated, the UN has been enhanced, and Israel (with America coupled to it) has been somewhat humbled. Those were not Washington's aims, but it has had to accept them.

It was not necessarily any moral conversion among George Bush's advisers that brought about this result, though it is an example of political theory not surviving contact with the real world. Until recently, especially with the appointment of arch-UN critic John Bolton as his representative there, Mr Bush had adopted the Republican right-wing view that the organisation was corrupt, bureaucratic, unduly liberal and an instrument in the hands of America's enemies. There remains a distrust of international agencies in Washington (except those it controls). But many dangerous disputes in the world are likely to be solved only by third-party intervention, ...

Pope Benedict was leaving himself open to challenge when he remarked in an interview that women "are very present in the departments of the Holy See". It was a tacit invitation to delve into the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican's Year Book, and count them. The result, according to our Rome correspondent Robert Mickens, is that no more than 15 per cent of the named total of officials of the Holy See are ...

To adapt Winston Churchill's famous phrase, jaw-jaw has replaced war-war in the Middle East, at least for the time being, and that has to be a change for the better. Israel now has to digest the rough handling its army received from Hezbollah, decide whether the campaign was a catastrophe or not, and if so, whom to sack. The Government of Lebanon has to begin the huge task of reconstruction following Israel's ...

A few days before the International Aids Conference in Toronto, a report on HIV-Aids in Africa by the mainly evangelical agency Tearfund has concluded that church congregations all over Africa are in the front line in dealing with the depredations of Aids. Working with extended families, they are particularly notable in the care they give to the millions of orphans the epidemic has produced. The report calls for a ...

So far, the usual long, hot summer of sectarian tension associated with the marching season in Northern Ireland has passed without a single soldier on the streets. Gradually the old hatreds seem to be diminishing, for which some credit has to go to the Nationalist community's traditional foe, the Orange Order. The Government has proposed turning the annual Orange marches, once the focus of anti-Catholic antagonism, ...