For presidents, like sports-team managers, the tough weeks tend to outnumber the jubilant. But even by the standards of an unforgiving job, Barack Obama could be forgiven for feeling unusually buffeted of late. Many of the blows have come on the domestic front, with the all-consuming stand-off of the government shutdown segueing into frantic efforts to defend and repair the roll-out of Obamacare amid charges of fatal technological incompetence.

One morning in June, the owners of the African restaurant La Mamma in Warsaw found ugly and offensive graffiti near its entrance. Someone in the Muranow neighborhood, the site of the former Jewish ghetto, apparently did not like the restaurant, which is a meeting place for Nigerian immigrants. To make sure the eatery’s owner got the message, the offender painted a black man hanging from a rope and added the words, “chocolate daddy.”

This post-industrial city near the Brittany coast has tried all manner of things to distinguish itself as the other important city in France. Theme-park style rides combined with public art – loads of it, literally, including a giant mechanical elephant that sashays out to a plaza with up to 30 people on its back, and playfully sprays water from its trunk at those on the ground. A memorial celebrating abolition, as a mea culpa for being a major seaport for the slave trade.

This week, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said his statement that only “a minority of Roma” want to integrate in France only shocked those “who don’t know the issue”. But as someone who has researched and followed this issue, I am shocked. When I asked Roma families in France about their lives, hopes and the challenges they face, they wished for the same things we all do: to work, to live in dignity, and togive their children a good education.

Madrid is the first city we lived in (seven weeks there, seven months Berlin, three months Paris) and is the cleanest of them. Every day, I believe, Plaza de la Paja, the oldest square in Madrid, on which we lived, was hosed down, and garbage collected. Contrary perhaps to stereotype, Berlin was dirtier than Madrid (and Paris dirtier than both).

Lech Walesa has called for Poland to unite with Germany to form one European state, despite the bloody history between the two countries. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Polish president, whose Solidarity trade union played a key role in bringing an end to the Cold War, said the world had changed and needed new ways of organising itself.

As the world marks the 500 year anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese people to China, a wave of Chinese investment and capital is pouring into Portugal. Portugal was the first European power to establish a permanent settlement in China and was the last to leave when it returned Macau to Beijing in 1999.

This time next year, the question of Scottish independence will be decided. New research published by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, presented in Edinburgh this week (and not yet online), talks about Scottish currency. Not terribly glamorous, but rather important. And there is bad news for Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP).