A Philandering French President, a Complex Election in Egypt Egyptian election officials counted ballots in a referendum on the new constitution, an election that was boycotted by many citizens. The Middle East was much in the news these past days, with all its maddening ambiguities and conflicts on full display. It began with the funeral of Ariel Sharon, at which the tributes seemed the start of his transformation from scarred veteran of military and political wars into Israeli folk hero. Yet the remarkable saga of the real "Arik" Sharon was of an alternately vilified and lionized leader whose personal history was inextricably intertwined with the history of the Jewish state, and as complex. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday the Egyptians were called on for yet another vote, this one a referendum on a new constitution backed by the military rulers. The result was preordained to be "yes," but the turnout was a mere 37 percent, only slightly higher than the 33 percent the Muslim Brotherhood had corralled for its constitution 13 months earlier, before it was ousted and outlawed once again. In the United States on Friday, President Obama announced important new restrictions on the collection of information about ordinary Americans. He called for more oversight of the intelligence community and acknowledged that intrusive forms of technology threaten civil liberties. Two other developments of the week brought to mind the French adage, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." One was the revelation that François Hollande was having an affair. That put Mr. Hollande in bed with nearly every other French president since Charles de Gaulle, but Mr. Hollande's problem is that he also has lower popularity ratings than any of those presidents and has not put much of a dent in France's stubbornly high unemployment. On the weather front, a new draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel of climate experts, said that time was running out to deal with climate change by reducing carbon emissions. The choice was between some economic pain now, the panel effectively said, or a whole lot more if nothing is done in the next 15 years. After that, the world will be obliged to prevent terrible consequences by developing costly ways of wringing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Footnote: a week after Atlanta plunged to a record 6 degrees Fahrenheit, a brutal heat wave Down Under compelled Australian Open officials to suspend tennis play for several hours. Ça change. About Sharon It is hard to imagine that much could be left to say about Ariel Sharon after all that has been written about him since his death on Jan. 11. But such was his extraordinary life, and so closely did it parallel the birth and rise of the Jewish state, that the testimonies have not stopped flowing. "He symbolized the anguish and dilemmas of Israel," wrote Henry A. Kissinger, who was among many American statesmen to tangle with the Israeli "Bulldozer." Uri Avnery, an Israeli of Mr. Sharon's generation who parted ways with him when Mr. Avnery founded the peace movement, compared Mr. Sharon to a Roman emperor in an article distributed by email: "Sharon was a supreme being, admired and feared, generous and cruel, genial and treacherous, hedonistic and corrupt, a victorious general and a war criminal, quick to make decisions and unwavering once he had made them, overcoming all obstacles by sheer force of personality." Grievously wounded in the 1948 Israeli war of independence, Mr. Sharon survived to play a critical role in subsequent Israeli wars. That became the pattern of his military and political life: brilliant in his successes, he would be undone by arrogance and insubordination and would retreat until called up again. His end was fully in character: felled by a stroke in January 2006, he lay in a coma for eight years before dying. I met Mr. Sharon when I interviewed him in the elegant stone house of his ranch in the northern Negev, in May 1996, shortly before national elections on which hinged the fate of the Oslo accords, signed three years earlier. Mr. Sharon, fiercely opposed to Oslo, appeared not to understand why President Bill Clinton did not see things his way. "I and my wife, we sleep with a gun under our bed," Mr. Sharon declared. I say with a full heart that the American president does not sleep with a gun under his bed. The security of the Jews was Mr. Sharon's guiding principle. I understand war and peace. But for me peace means security," he told me. If it doesn't provide security for the state of Israel now and in the future, I don't regard it as peace. Security justified ruthless measures; security justified the Israeli settlements on the West Bank that Mr. Sharon was instrumental in building; but when he believed that security was better served by pulling back, he did that, first in Sinai, then Gaza. We will never know whether the Middle East would look different today if Mr. Sharon had been around the past eight years. But Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts to secure a "framework" for a final Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement seemed a mournful echo of the many frameworks and road maps pushed by many secretaries of state past. Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli defense minister, prompted an embarrassed round of apologies when a newspaper reported that he had said Mr. Kerry was "acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor." The real question was how widely that sentiment was shared in Benjamin Netanyahu's government, which, shortly after Mr. Kerry left, had announced plans for 1,400 new homes in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Egyptian Vote The official subject of the Egyptian referendum was a new draft constitution, and there was little doubt that it would pass. But the vote had more to do with validating the military's ouster of t President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, in July, and the likely presidential bid by the military leader, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. The turnout was not high, but the vote was expected to be a landslide "yes," given that the referendum was boycotted by the Brotherhood, which has been declared a terrorist organization, and by many of the young activists involved in the original Tahrir Square protests of 2011. The new constitution eliminates some of the Islamist elements of the one Mr. Morsi pushed through, but it enhances the power and autonomy of the military, the police and the judiciary, clearing the way for the kind of authoritarian system that the 2011 activists thought they had gotten rid of. In another sad postscript to the Arab Spring, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report grimly critical of the State Department for the lack of security that led to the sacking of the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, and the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The bipartisan report was broadly in line with earlier findings, but its bottom line was wrenching: "the attacks were preventable."