The Global Glitter: How a Tiny Rock Became Earth’s Most Expensive Hostage Negotiation Byline: Geneva, via Antwerp’s diamond vaults and a Shenzhen lab—where love is weighed in carats and carbon. Somewhere between the moment a Belgian polisher squints at a 0.9-carat stone and the instant a nervous software engineer in Bangalore drops two months’ salary…
Labour Conference 2025: The World Watches Britain Try to Remember What a Pay Rise Looks Like By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Brighton, United Kingdom—The seagulls here have learned to time their dive-bomb raids for the exact moment a delegate bites into a £14 halloumi wrap, a skill that would be admirable if…
The Name That Echoes Louder Than Google: Chris Jones, Unlicensed Global Phenomenon By “World-Weary” Watanabe, Tokyo Bureau, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a Singaporean hawker stall and a Madrid metro platform, the phrase “Chris Jones” is being muttered with the same hushed urgency usually reserved for tax shelters or the Wi-Fi password at Davos. The man,…
Victoria Falls, that thundering curtain of water the locals politely call “The Smoke That Thunders,” has always offered a convenient metaphor for southern Africa: loud, wet, and impossible to ignore. These days the roar is coming not from the Zambezi but from two neighboring countries—Zimbabwe and Botswana—whose latest tiff is less a border skirmish than…
The Department Store: A Monument to Global Delusion Somewhere between the perfume counter and the final markdown rack, the modern department store has become our most honest confession booth. From Tokyo’s Shibuya Parco to Istanbul’s Istinye Park, these multi-story confessionals offer a single universal truth: we are all, in our own special way, catastrophically disappointed…
KYIV—Somewhere between the third air-raid siren and the fourth espresso, you realize the war in Ukraine has become the planet’s most macabre subscription service: it autorenews every morning, drains the global wallet, and still hasn’t figured out how to skip the ads. Two years, five summits, and roughly 17,000 think-tank papers later, the front lines…
President Nelson Health: When the Heartbeat of a Nation Becomes a Global EKG Geneva—In the marble corridors of the World Health Organization, an unspoken question flickers across interpreters’ headsets: “How’s the old ticker?” The query isn’t about a medical chart; it’s shorthand for President Nelson’s cardiac stent, upgraded last week in a gleaming Cape Town…
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…
Jimmy Crute, the Australian light-heavyweight whose surname sounds suspiciously like a medical device, has become an unlikely barometer for the planet’s collective mood. While most MMA fighters offer nothing more than blood, sweat, and recycled trash-talk, Crute’s career arc mirrors the global tendency to sprint head-first into obvious disaster, dust ourselves off, and then brag…
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 planet is 71 % water, but this week the other 29 % is busy arguing about a 1.82-metre Portuguese scarecrow named João Palhinha. From the glass towers of Singapore to the corrugated favelas of Rio, the same phrase is trending: “Palhinha’s finally gone.” Fulham supporters are sobbing into their overpriced craft beer, Bayern Munich…
College Gameday Picks Today: A Global Ritual of Hope, Hubris, and 18-Year-Old Knees By Our Correspondent in a Dublin Airport Lounge, Pretending to Care About the Spread DUBLIN—Somewhere above the Atlantic, a cargo Boeing 777 hums eastward with 40 tons of refrigerated Wagyu destined for a Qatari prince’s Super-Saturday viewing soirée. On board the same…
