Stockton-on-Tees, a town whose very name sounds like an accounting error, has become the latest contestant in humanity’s longest-running reality show: “How Many Bullets Fit in a Saturday Night?” The shooting that left one man perforated and three others fashionably ventilated has ricocheted far beyond the Tees, prompting the usual international choreography: British politicians furrowing…
A Knife on the Rails: How One Ukrainian Girl’s Murder Became the World’s Latest Morality Play KYIV–PRAGUE–NEW DELHI, 24 May — If you want a snapshot of our collective attention span in 2024, picture this: somewhere between compartment 7 and the dining car, a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl named Darya Kovalenko was fatally stabbed on the…
Dow Futures: The World’s Most Expensive Horoscope, Now in Real Time By A. L. “Lex” Morose, International Correspondent, Somewhere with Terrible Wi-Fi They say the sun never sets on the British Empire; these days it merely rotates through time zones of sleepless traders watching the Dow Jones futures flicker like a cardiac monitor for late-stage…
Facebook’s Billion-Dollar “Oops” Reaches Every Corner of the Globe—Except, Predictably, Your Wallet By the time the sun rose over Silicon Valley, the legal settlement had already been translated into 43 languages, forwarded by 12 million WhatsApp aunts, and memed by teenagers from Lagos to Lahore who will never see a cent. Meta’s $725 million privacy-violation…
Ross-on-Wye: The World’s Most Politely Apocalyptic Town By “Dave’s Locker” Global Affairs Desk If the planet ever opts for a soft landing into oblivion, it will probably do so in Ross-on-Wye, a riverside confection in Herefordshire whose half-timbered Tudor façades look like they were assembled by a Brexit-era IKEA, complete with missing democratic screws. From…
The Curious Global Afterlife of Graham Roberts, the Footballer Who Refused to Die on Schedule By Our Man in the Departure Lounge Somewhere between a FIFA ethics inquiry and the 14th replay of Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God,” the name Graham Roberts flickers across a Lagos sports-bar screen, then a pub in Tallinn, then a…
PARIS—Across the boulevard from a café where the espresso costs more than the average monthly wage in Sri Lanka, an elderly French banker folds his copy of The Wall Street Journal with the reverence of a priest dismissing a sacred text. The gesture is more telling than the Dow’s latest tantrum: to the world beyond…
Racing Post: The Global Glue Holding Together a Planet That’s Already at Full Gallop By Santiago “Santi” Varga, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker LONDON—On a rain-lashed Tuesday that looks indistinguishable from every other Tuesday since 2019, the Racing Post lands in betting shops from Galway to Guangzhou with the soft thud of recycled promise. To the…
Laure Ferrari and the Fine Art of Disappearing in Plain Sight By our cynical correspondent in Brussels It takes a special kind of talent to vanish from the European Parliament while still technically occupying a seat. Laure Ferrari—yes, that Ferrari, the one who once compared the EU to a “concentration camp run by vegetarians”—has spent…
The World According to 9/11 Times A global correspondent’s sardonic travelogue through the age that began with two falling towers and never quite ended By the time the North Tower folded itself into a neat heap of irony at 10:28 a.m. Eastern, it was already happy-hour in Singapore, siesta in Madrid, and Tuesday’s second cup…
A Yacht Too Far: Roman Abramovich and the Art of Losing Everything Except the Bill By Dave’s Foreign Desk, currently anchored in a moral grey zone somewhere west of Cyprus There are billionaires who merely buy football clubs; then there is Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich, the man who turned oligarchy into a spectator sport. For two…
Teaching Tiny Humans About the Day the World Lost Its Innocence (and Its Mind) PARIS—Every September, history teachers from Reykjavik to Rio face the same awkward choreography: how to explain to a room of nine-year-olds why two buildings once fell down and turned the planet into a permanent airport security queue. The trick, veteran educators…
