**The Girl Who Came Back from the Dead (State)** LONDON – In the pantheon of spectacularly bad life choices, few can compete with joining ISIS for the cultural equivalent of a one-way ticket to the sun. Yet here we are, a decade later, still discussing Shamima Begum as if she’s the prodigal daughter rather than…
The planet is currently 8.3 billion souls deep and still counting, yet for nine consecutive nights every autumn roughly a fifth of them voluntarily surrender sleep, carbohydrates, and any remaining sense of irony. Welcome to Navratri— the festival that proves humanity can synchronize global insomnia without a single push-notification from Meta. Picture it: from the…
The House of Guinness: A Black-Pint Empire in a World That’s Already Had Too Much to Drink By Our Correspondent, still sober enough to file copy DUBLIN—If nations were measured by the froth on their exports, Ireland would be a superpower. And the House of Guinness—now a slick Diageo subsidiary masquerading as a 264-year-old family…
Javier Hernández—known to stadium PA announcers in five languages and to immigration officers as “please step aside, sir”—is the last living argument that globalization sometimes works exactly the way the brochure promised. Born in Guadalajara, polished in Manchester, monetized in Madrid, and lately spotted gamboling about Los Angeles like an endangered species that learned to…
Crypto: The Glorious Global Game of Digital Make-Believe By Our Man in the Ether If you want to watch humanity audition for a remake of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” buy a plane ticket—any ticket—and ask the first person you meet about their crypto strategy. From the glass towers of Singapore to the tin-roof kiosks of…
The Red-Chart Blues: A Global Postcard from the Crypto Abyss Dave’s Locker – International Desk Somewhere between Seoul’s neon trading cafés and a Berlin co-working loft that still smells of yesterday’s oat-milk flat whites, Bitcoin is sulking at a six-week low and every Telegram group from Lagos to Lima has mutated into a digital support…
The Ether Between Us: How a Line of Code in Zug Decides Whether Your Cousin in Manila Can Afford Dinner ZUG, Switzerland – Every morning at precisely 09:00 CET, the gnomes of Crypto Valley finish their cortados, crack their knuckles, and nudge Ethereum’s price a few basis points—just enough to make a grandmother in Lagos…
Cathay Pacific Flies Straight Into the Turbulence of a Multipolar World By our correspondent in the airport lounge where optimism goes to die Hong Kong—On paper, Cathay Pacific is just another airline trying to coax human cargo into ever-smaller seats while its accountants figure out how to charge for oxygen. In practice, the 77-year-old carrier…
**The Last Civilised Voice: How Radio 4 Became Britain’s Accidental Cultural Ambassador** While the rest of the world spirals into TikTok-induced dementia, there’s something almost endearingly anachronistic about Britain’s Radio 4—a station that still believes words should contain more than two syllables and that “content” isn’t necessarily a synonym for “brain rot.” Picture this: Somewhere…
The silver-gray silhouettes that streak across the Sea of Okhotsk are not just machines; they are postcards from a country that insists on writing in all-caps. Russian fighter jets—Sukhois, MiGs, and that theatrical new kid, the Su-57 “Felon”—have become the Kremlin’s preferred punctuation marks in every geopolitical sentence it deems too subtle. One day they…
Zug, Switzerland – where the cows outnumber the regulators and every fondue pot doubles as a shell company – has once again become the unlikely stage for the world’s longest-running crypto-soap opera: the XRP melodrama. Just when you thought the Ripple-SEC lawsuit had settled into the comfortable rhythm of a Scandinavian slow-TV train ride, the…
COVID-19, 2025 Edition: A Global Game of Viral Whac-A-Mole Where Everyone’s Still Losing By the time you finish this paragraph, another subvariant has probably emerged in a crowded bazaar in Dhaka, an airport lounge in Dubai, or—if the genome gods are feeling nostalgic—a wet market within spitting distance of Wuhan. Five years into the pandemic,…
