Elliot Hannon

Inverness is a fishing village with a reach of a mile or so of coastal highway in Nova Scotia, Canada. A year ago, local organizers started a lottery, “Chase the Ace,” to raise funds for a small community center. When the contest began the jackpot was around two hundred dollars, so the organizers kicked in some extra cash to sweeten the deal. This coming Saturday, the jackpot will be at least $1.2 million. Full story.

When the Pakistani national baseball team arrived in Brooklyn, this week, to play in a qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic, it was the first time in a year that its players had set foot on a regulation baseball diamond. There are no real baseball fields at all in Pakistan, apart from two tucked away at the U.S. Embassy, in Islamabad. To practice in their home country, the team has carved out base paths on a local soccer field and mashed bricks into the earth to simulate the rubber of a pitching mound. (Full story.)

This might sound strange, but I was on the streets of New Delhi when the power went out Tuesday and I didn't learn about the biggest blackout in history until I read about it later online. The roads did seem particularly crowded, even for New Delhi. But there are often inexplicable traffic jams and curious flash mobs of all sorts in this sprawling city. When I turned on the TV, Indian reporters were in a tizzy, reporting from darkened subway stations and jammed street corners. I got emails from the U.S. asking if I was safe and calls from editors asking what was going on. But everything else felt about the same. (Full story)

There's an elephant in Namibia. Actually, there's more than one elephant trudging through the bush in Namibia's Etosha National Park, but this particular elephant is more protected than even the most endangered species -- and has better abs.

What's going on in Namibia these days isn't much of a secret: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's decision to have their baby there. While you don't have to be a National Enquirer subscriber to know that at this point (just able to read or operate a TV remote), the question on the lips of a puzzled world, excluding National Geographic junkies, is what's so great about Namibia? (Full story.)

One of the perks of being a pro athlete, you would think, is that you don't have to maintain a résumé. I'm guessing that Kobe Bryant has never suffered the indignity of typing up an "Honors & Awards" section or had to remember to put the good paper in the laser printer before running off a dozen copies of his CV. But not every athlete is Kobe Bryant. Let's assume you're a ballplayer on the fringes—you graduated from a college that's better known for honing academic credentials than frontcourt fundamentals, or maybe you didn't play college basketball at all. I've got bad news for you, friend: You're going to have to update that résumé—and quick. (Full story.)

It’s been a tough 12 months for India’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Last spring, the center-right political counterweight to the Gandhi clan’s left-leaning Congress Party was routed in India’s national elections, losing two dozen seats in the country’s lower house after mustering just 19 percent of the national vote. After last spring’s crushing defeat, the party vowed to rise again. Can the party survive while still holding on to its founding ideology? (Full story.)

In professional sports, the off-season isn't supposed to make headlines. When India's fledgling professional cricket league, the Indian Premier League (IPL), ended its season in late April, however, the championship match won by the Chennai Super Kings felt more like a prelude than a grand finale. Sensational tales of corruption among the country's wealthiest and most powerful — the very franchise owners who had made the IPL "the world's hottest sports league" — had shifted the focus from the field to a looming boardroom war over the league's survival.

The intrigue is wrapped up in the fate of the league's founder and chief architect, Lalit Modi. Throughout India, Modi, a member of a powerful Indian family, is both a revered and a reviled figure. The brash businessman's ambition hoisted the IPL into existence, but his impatient bravado has run afoul of India's most entrenched hierarchical reflexes, making him many powerful enemies. (Full story.)

Donald Trump has given hundreds, perhaps thousands of speeches and says a lot of things, but something about his meandering word slurry of an address Wednesday night in Cincinnati felt like a departure even by Trumpian rhetorical standards. The Donald was uncommonly loose, unbuttoned to the point of intoxication, as he ticked off his normal stump talking points while veering into variety show-style mimicry that surpassed his previous speeches not in venom, but in stagecraft. (Full story)

On Thursday night, CNN enlisted Anderson Cooper to host a town hall with President Obama on “Guns in America” in an attempt to cut through the noise with an hour-or-so of civil discourse on the role of guns in the country. Cooper stressed at the outset that the idea for the forum was CNN’s and the National Rifle Association had also been asked to join, but declined. The organization’s presence was still felt. (Full story.)

Someday, Elon Musk assures us, there will be self-learning, self-improving robots that will be able to live and learn, love and laugh and annihilate us all, just like a real boy; but, until that day comes, it appears we’re stuck with this janky Atari version of Marco Rubio. After a rocky debate outing over the weekend, where the Florida Republican got roughed up by rival Chris Christie for a strange, Small Wonder-like repetition of Barack Obama knows exactly what he’s doing talking points, Rubio came into the new week looking to regain his mojo, which hit peak-levels during his strong third-place *victory* in Iowa. (Full story.)