The World According to Russell M. Nelson: A Non-Mormon Planet Watches a 99-Year-Old Heart Surgeon Rewrite Global Religion in Real Time By Dave’s Locker International Bureau In the grand geopolitical casino, where nuclear buttons are fondled like worry beads and billionaires race to Mars to escape the mess they financed, Russell M. Nelson has quietly…
Shot in the Arm: How a Tiny Vial Became the Planet’s Most Politicized Drop of Liquid By Lila Moreau, International Correspondent, somewhere between the duty-free Dior counter and the syringe disposal bin Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, a refrigerated box the size of a carry-on suitcase contains 1,200 doses of a vaccine that could prevent 1,200…
Somewhere over the international dateline, a refrigerated crate labeled “Pfizer/BioNTech” is doing the sort of jet-lagged shuffle most of us only perform after an ill-advised red-eye to Bangkok. Inside are 3,200 doses that left Belgium last Tuesday, paused in Dubai to admire the duty-free chocolate, and are now bound for a provincial clinic in Papua…
A Shot Heard ’Round the World: How a Needle the Size of a Housefly Became the Planet’s Most Contested Diplomatic Weapon Dave’s Locker | International Desk PARIS—It takes about 1.2 seconds to inject 0.3 millilitres of Pfizer-BioNTech into a deltoid, yet the global reverberations from that blink-and-you-miss-it act have kept ambassadors up later than any…
In the shadow of real-world supply-chain meltdowns, drone strikes on grain silos, and the slow-motion car crash we politely call “global governance,” one multinational conflict rages on with the moral clarity of a sugar-crazed toddler: Mario Kart. Yes, the Nintendo confection that debuted in 1992 has quietly become the planet’s most reliable diplomatic summit—equal parts…
Croatia: The Mediterranean’s Prettiest Paradox Quietly Wagging the World The first thing international investors notice about Croatia is that its coastline looks like Italy’s but costs half as much—an observation that makes Venetian real-estate agents pray to Saint Mark with renewed fervor. Yet beyond the terracotta roofs and Game-of-Thrones gift-shop tedium, this nation of 3.8…
Hunger Games: The Global Edition—Where the Arena Keeps Expanding By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent The phrase “hunger games” once belonged strictly to the fiction aisle, somewhere between teenage angst and flaming couture. But in 2024, the franchise has escaped the multiplex and gone on a world tour—no passport required, just the willingness to watch entire…
The Score Act: A Bureaucratic Lullaby for a Planet That Can’t Count Geneva, Tuesday, 3:17 a.m.—While half the Northern Hemisphere slept off its election-night hangover and the other half doom-scrolled through yet another currency collapse, the World Harmonized Scoring, Credit & Oversight Regulation Exchange Act—mercifully acronymized to “The Score Act”—quietly cleared its final procedural hurdle…
The Curious Case of the World’s Loudest Whisperers A dispatch from the international noise floor They began as a humble American soccer club, the Seattle Sounders, but—like most things American—they refused to stay in their lane. Now, from Dakar to Dubai, the term “sounders” is being co-opted, repurposed, and weaponized by an odd alliance of…
The Kadyn Proctor Saga, or How a 19-Year-Old Lineman Became a Geopolitical Football By Dave’s Locker International Desk (Still Recovering from Jet Lag) In the grand geopolitical chessboard, it’s heart-warming to know that a 6-foot-7, 360-pound teenager from Des Moines can still move more markets, ministries, and message-board moderators than a medium-sized central bank. Enter…
Twins: The Original Global Supply Chain Glitch By Our Man in the Field, nursing jet-lag and an espresso in Terminal 3 The planet now hosts roughly 1.6 million fresh pairs of twins a year—an annual cohort large enough to qualify as the world’s 153rd-largest country, somewhere between Eswatini and Fiji. That should worry the United…
By the time the final whistle blew on Estadio BBVA last night, the only thing louder than the 50,000-odd fans was the collective groan from global sports-betting syndicates. Monterrey 2–1 Santos Laguna: an ordinary Liga MX scoreline that nonetheless managed to send seismic tremors through three continents, two shadow economies, and at least one hedge…
