  In this talk, I present the status of attempts to analyze the behavior of the
so-called spatial 't Hooft loop, which can be taken as an order parameter for
the deconfinement phase transition in pure SU(N) gauge theory. While lattice
data show a strikingly universal scaling of extracted k-string tensions for
various values of k and N, the analytic approach to these observables might
need some refinement.
