BBC News UK: The Empire’s Last Polite Broadcaster Tries to Stay Relevant While the World Burns by Our Correspondent in a Café with Suspiciously Imperial Décor, Somewhere East of Calais The planet tunes in each day—via shortwave, TikTok clip, or the backseat screen of a Delhi Uber—to watch a small island politely explain itself to…
The Duchess of Kent’s Quiet Rebellion: How a Royal Non-Entity Just Became the World’s Most Useful Monarch By the time you’ve finished your second espresso in whatever time zone you’re pretending to care about, Her Royal Highness Katharine, Duchess of Kent, has already done more for global soft diplomacy than most parliaments manage in a…
Sky News: A Small Island’s Loud Megaphone That the World Can’t Mute By Dave’s Locker International Desk LONDON—In the great bazaar of global news, Sky News is that stall run by the bloke who insists his artisanal hogwash is ethically sourced while simultaneously flogging you a half-price knock-off Rolex. Born in 1989 as Rupert Murdoch’s…
The World According to Auntie: Why the BBC Still Matters (and Still Gets Yelled at by Everyone) By the time the Greenwich pips finish pipping, the British Broadcasting Corporation has already been accused of colonial nostalgia, metropolitan elitism, and—on a slow Tuesday—ruining the nation’s tea by running a story about oat milk. Such is the…
Global Bulletin: Sheinelle Jones and the Glorious Mundanity of the 24-Hour Apocalypse Watch By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk NEW YORK—In the same week that the Arctic registered its first 30-degree-Celsius February temperature and the Bank of Japan toyed with negative interest rates like a cat batting a dead mouse, American morning television offered its own…
College Board: The Great American Sorting Hat Goes Global By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the Atlantic If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Kafka and Milton Friedman co-designed a dating app for 17-year-olds, look no further than the College Board: a 123-year-old non-profit whose primary export is anxiety, laminated in…
Angela Rayner Has Not Resigned: The Earth Keeps Spinning, Somehow By our man in a trench coat somewhere between London and Lampedusa Word reached the foreign press desks at 03:47 GMT that Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the UK Labour Party and the only person in British politics who can credibly wear both stilettos and…
Nick Kyrgios: The Antipodean Trickster Who Became the Planet’s Favorite Villain in a Sport That Loves Its Villains By the time the first champagne cork popped in Monte Carlo’s tax-optimized penthouses, word had already reached the Gaza strip, the Lagos hip-hop club, and a Dalian dormitory that Nick Kyrgios was at it again. Somewhere between…
The Spy Who Never Retired: How James Bond Became the Last Remaining Global Soft-Power Superpower By Our Man in Geneva with the Hangover When the credits rolled on *No Time to Die* in 2021, MI6’s most flamboyant employee technically ceased to exist in the continuity—blown to a respectful, socially-distanced mist somewhere off the coast of…
The world’s most dangerous flower isn’t the poppy blooming in Helmand or the one on a Remembrance Day lapel; it’s the poppy that installs itself on every corporate laptop from Lisbon to Lagos and quietly calls home to Cambridge. Poppy Gustafsson—yes, that is her real, almost too-perfect name—has turned nation-state-grade espionage into a subscription service,…
WASHINGTON—If you want to know how the rest of the planet is faring, skip Davos and just loiter on the National Mall for an hour. The air itself has become the world’s most honest diplomat: it imports Saharan dust, Canadian wildfire smoke, and Gulf Stream humidity like a black-market bazaar of atmospheric contraband. Locals call…
It is 04:47 GMT and the planet is already laughing. Somewhere between a TikTok livestream from Jakarta and the BBC’s sober pre-dawn bulletin, the American Powerball has coughed up another instant plutocrat—one ticket, sold at a Speedway gas station in—wait for it—Noblesville, Indiana. The jackpot clocked in at a tasteful US $1.326 billion, which, for…
