The flamboyant former NBA star is visiting the reclusive Communist state with three members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team and a Vice film crew, to shoot a documentary for HBO.

For a brief moment on Tuesday, the nuclear dispute between Iran and the United States took a back seat to sport...Diplomatic ties between Iran and the United States have been cut since 1980 after Iranian students took 52 U.S. diplomats hostage in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution. But wrestling, one of Iran's most popular sports, has proven a rare arena in which the two countries have friendly relations.

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman brought his basketball skills and flamboyant style -- neon-bleached hair, tattoos, nose studs and all -- on Tuesday to the isolated Communist country with possibly the world's drabbest dress code: North Korea. Arriving in Pyongyang, the American athlete and showman known as "The Worm" became an unlikely ambassador for sports diplomacy at a time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.

Few Australians are aware that Indian contingents fought alongside the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli that is so central to the founding myth of Australian (and New Zealand) identity. As cricket legend Rahul Dravid noted in the 2011 Bradman Oration at the Australian War Memorial, appropriately enough, 1,300 Indian soldiers lost their lives at Gallipoli. Indians fought alongside Australians also in “El Alamein, North Africa, in the Syria-Lebanon campaign, in Burma, in the battle for Singapore” during the Second World War.

Two US athletes, Major League Baseball Hall-of-Famer Barry Larkin and Olympian Natasha Watley, are headed to India as sports envoys to encourage youth participation in sports. During their Feb 12-18 trip to India, Larkin and Whatley will lead baseball and softball clinics in New Delhi and Imphal for underserved youth and their coaches, as well as engage in dialogue on sports and diversity, the State Department announced Tuesday.

Waiting for David in the concrete bowels of the Parc des Princes is a sweaty affair. More than 400 journalists have packed into a press room which can comfortably take 200 and usually attracts 20. The boy David – at 37, there is something still irresistibly boyish about Beckham – has been undergoing a medical at the hospital where Diana, Princess of Wales, died in August 1997.

Bravely (or recklessly) writing these lines in Ottawa, I am running the risk of being ostracized by my Canadian hockey-loving colleagues and friends for as much as hinting any approval of the KHL—Russia-led Kontinental Hockey League (spelled with a K so as not to be confused with several existing CHL sports acronyms and to resemble its original Cyrillic spelling).