The Guardian (London)

President Obama's efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states, including a Palestinian state, received a much appreciated, if surprising, boost with the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to the US president. It's fair to assume that the Nobel prize committee is hoping that the award will promote Obama's diplomatic efforts across a range of issues.

Throughout the healthcare debate, President Obama has not always appeared very "presidential". He hasn't engaged in LBJ-like arm twisting or FDR-like brinksmanship, or exerted the strong leadership that the office of the presidency has been known to possess. Other than his brilliant healthcare speech in early September, Obama has mostly seemed content to lay low while the Senate thrashes out the details.

Much hope has been invested in Barack Obama's ability to strike a new course for the US following eight years of Bush administration unpopularity. Yet many in the US and abroad are impatient with the pace of progress under the Obama administration. The president made the rounds on five news talk shows on Sunday as he pressed his policies and vision, preparing for what is likely to be a difficult week.

Europeans are shaking their heads over their American friends again. Whether talking to people in the street, in the cafés or to journalists or political leaders, everyone here asks me the same question: Has America lost its mind? Town halls filled with angry citizens, shouting at their elected leaders, some of them armed with guns and threatening signs? Besides the media spectacle of these neo-1776 revolutionaries, what is doubly perplexing to Europeans is the focus of the protests: healthcare.

Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation agreed: "The Obama people always saw Bill as more of a threat than Hillary," he said. ...

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U.S. Supreme court confirmations are a good time to reflect on some basic precepts of our "separation of powers" system of government. Like previous nominees, Sonia Sotomayor faced the Senate judiciary committee's firing squad, as partisan tensions played out over lifetime appointment to a court that has no retirement age. At 54 years of age, Sotomayor, whose nomination the full Senate votes on today, easily could serve for three decades.

Peter Bergen, an expert on intelligence at the New America Foundation, said that the CIA is not likely to be put through the wringer in quite the way it was in the 1970s when senator Frank Church's committee laid bare an array of illegal activities. But the agency will have to account for recent actions.

Look, it took the Israelis 15 years to find Eichmann," says Peter Bergen, a journalist, terrorism expert and one of the few westerners to have actually met Bin Laden - he interviewed him in 1997. His personal guess is that the Saudi construction heir ...

"There are these two countries that the world blames for doing nothing, and they have a better story to tell," said Terry Tamminen, who took part in the talks and is an environmental adviser to the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. ...

New America president Steve Coll lauded Miliband as one who had embraced the new technologies in the service of pubic discourse. On a horizontally split screen, the face of New America innovation guru Steve Clemons, director of the foundation's American Strategy Program, occupied the upper portion via Skype from a perch in Berlin