The Disappearance That Refuses to Retire: How One British Toddler Became the Whole Planet’s True-Crime Comfort Blanket By the time the Portuguese sun rose on 4 May 2007, the world had already appointed itself lead detective. Madeleine McCann, three years old and conspicuously photogenic, had vanished from a holiday flat in Praia da Luz while…
The Tuesday-night EuroMillions draw—an innocuous enough affair, really: seven numbered ping-pong balls ricocheting in a French glass cylinder—managed, as always, to pull off the geopolitical miracle of uniting roughly 230 million Europeans in the same doomed fantasy. From Lisbon to Ljubljana, ticket holders synchronized their heartbeats to the same statistical delusion: 1 in 139,838,160, odds…
Hungary vs Portugal: The Quiet Balkanization of European Soft Power Bylines from the Danube to the Tagus, by someone who’s run out of passport pages and patience On the surface, the latest diplomatic joust between Budapest and Lisbon looks like a spat about EU recovery funds, some footnotes on judicial independence, and an energetic argument…
Paris, May – Somewhere between the baguette crumbs and the drone debris, the Franco-Ukrainian pas de deux has entered its third year, and the orchestra is still tuning the same dissonant chord. On the surface, Emmanuel Macron plays the dashing understudy to Volodymyr Zelensky’s blood-spattered lead, pledging Mirage jets, long-range missiles, and—because this is France—an…
Katarzyna Stoparczyk and the Quiet Collapse of Borders By our correspondent in the departure-lounge bar, Gate B12, somewhere east of reason If you have never heard of Katarzyna Stoparczyk, do not feel slighted; the planet’s filing system is famously sloppy. Yet in the humming corridors of Interpol’s General Secretariat in Lyon—where the coffee tastes like…
Eurobasket 2025: When the Continent’s Fractured Egos Learn to Share One Orange Ball and a Trophy By the Global Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker Berlin—The biennial festival of hardwood nationalism known as Eurobasket has rolled back into town, and once again Europe is pretending that twenty-four countries can resolve centuries of mutual suspicion by sweating through…
