If Earth were a half-finished jigsaw puzzle abandoned on a coffee table, New Zealand would be the pristine piece still in the box—edge intact, colors un-smeared, quietly wondering why everyone else looks so dog-eared. To the rest of the planet, Aotearoa is the last kid picked for dodgeball who turns out to be annoyingly good…
Harare, Monday – In the grand tapestry of geopolitics, nothing screams “existential urgency” quite like a cricket match between two countries whose combined GDP is roughly the annual coffee budget of a mid-tier Wall Street trading floor. Yet here we are, watching Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka lock horns in a T20 series that, on paper,…
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…
Eswatini: The Last Absolute Monarchy That Forgot to Update Its Marketing Strategy By Dave’s Locker International Desk Mbabane—Tucked between South Africa and Mozambique like a polite afterthought, Eswatini (née Swaziland) is the world’s last absolute monarchy whose ruler still insists on calling himself “Ingwenyama” instead of the far sexier “Supreme Leader” or “Emperor of Vibes.”…
Rio de Janeiro—population 6.2 million, GDP roughly the size of Slovakia, and the only city on Earth where a sunrise over Guanabara Bay competes for attention with a sunrise over a favela’s rooftop militia—has long served as global shorthand for “paradise with caveats.” The caveats, of course, are what keep foreign correspondents in gainful employment:…
