Laura Kuenssberg: The BBC’s Political Gladiator in the Global Colosseum By Dave’s Locker International Desk To the uninitiated, Laura Kuenssberg is merely the BBC’s former political editor—now elevated to Sunday-morning inquisitor on *Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg*—a job title that sounds suspiciously like a hostage video. Yet beyond Britain’s damp little island, her significance has metastasized…
LeBron James, Hall of Famer: A Global Empire Built on Sneakers, Screaming Fans, and the Fragile Myth of Meritocracy By Dave’s Locker International Desk It happened, inevitably, like a tax deadline or a coup in a midsized republic: LeBron James was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The ceremony took place in…
Noel Gallagher, the man who once claimed he’d “rather drink petrol straight from the pump” than reform Oasis, has quietly become the United Kingdom’s last functioning export that doesn’t require refrigeration, a customs form, or an emergency IMF bailout. While Downing Street lurches from self-inflicted crisis to crisis like a drunk tourist on the Ramblas,…
Sarah Pochin and the Quiet Collapse of Sovereignty A dispatch from the frontlines of a world that can’t be bothered to care By the time Sarah Pochin’s name trickled into the global feed—wedged between footage of a burning Bangladeshi textile market and a TikTok of a Finnish prime-ministerial dance-off—most capitals had already moved on to…
Hurricane Kiko, a name that sounds like a failed boy-band member, has decided to treat the Hawaiian archipelago to its own private luau of 120-mile-an-hour misery. From Berlin to Bangkok, commodity traders, insurers, and climate-voyeurs are watching the satellite loops the way teenagers binge true-crime podcasts: equal parts horror and entertainment. Because if a Category-3…
Liechtenstein: The Micro-Monarchy Quietly Running the World’s Off-Balance Sheet By the time you finish this sentence, Liechtenstein’s 39,000 citizens will have collectively earned another million francs, most of it from accounts whose owners would rather you not know their names. That’s the speed at which the planet’s sixth-smallest sovereign state moves money—fast enough to make…
Ros Canter: How One Woman and One Horse Are Quietly Redrawing the Map of Global Sport By the time most of us had finished our second coffee and begun pretending to answer emails, Ros Canter was already airborne somewhere above the dew-soaked turf of the Pratoni del Vivaro. The 32-year-old from Lincolnshire—population roughly equivalent to…
Tour de 4: How a Four-Letter Acronym Rode a Bicycle Around the World and Conquered Absolutely Nothing By Dave’s Locker’s Globetrotting Correspondent, still shaking sand out of his passport PARIS—The Tour de France is old news. This summer, the world’s attention has pivoted to the “Tour de 4,” a rolling circus of four cyclists, four…
**Highway to Hell: The Global Brotherhood of Truck Accident Lawyers** From the clogged arteries of Mumbai’s Western Express Highway to the fog-choked autobahns of Bavaria, a peculiar species of legal eagle has evolved to feast on humanity’s most spectacular vehicular disasters. The truck accident lawyer—part ambulance chaser, part commercial vehicle sommelier—has become the unofficial tour…
Luanda, Thursday – Somewhere between the oil rigs and the rusting Soviet apartment blocks, Angola has quietly become the punch-line the world pretends it isn’t in on. Once the Cold War’s favorite proxy slug-fest, the country now exports two commodities in bulk: crude petroleum and sardonic lessons in how to survive the twenty-first century with…
A Name That Travels: How “Laken Snelling” Became the World’s Favorite Meme-Cum-MacGuffin By Dave’s Foreign Desk, still jet-lagged in three time zones PARIS—Somewhere between the espresso fumes at Café de Flore and the perpetual drizzle of a British B-road, the words “Laken Snelling” started showing up on every smartphone screen like an unsolicited life-coaching text….
Paris, 8 March – If the planet’s attention span weren’t already shredded into TikTok confetti, you might have noticed that two very large men are about to punch each other into another tax bracket. Saturday night at the Accor Arena, Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane will contest the UFC’s “interim” heavyweight title—a belt so interim…
