Like Lisa Simpson said, “I know all those words, but that sign makes no sense.” Young Miss Simpson had been confronted with a “Yahoo Serious Festival”. My own offering is slightly less confusing but still leaves me baffled:
Jockeying Over Return to Big Easy Ongoing
The story is about New Orleans.
The political maneuvering over the return to NO is ongoing.
Jockeying means maneuvering or jostling between several people or groups.
The headline means that this maneuvering between several groups regarding when people will be allowed back into New Orleans is continuing for some time.
The mayor and the feds don’t agree on when people should be allowed to return to New Orleans. Mayor Nagin wants people to come back now, but FEMA and most other people are saying, “Not so fast, pal. New Orleans is still half-flooded with toxic sludge, and the city still doesn’t have electricity or drinkable water.”
What’s “Big Easy” then?
New Orleans = “Big Easy”.
A nickname for New Orleans.
Why is a British news organization running a headline that is easier for Yanks to understand than for Brits?
Never mind.
I would think that “Big Easy” is a fairly well-known nickname since it was the title of a movie.
But what about “Corrie star battles lung disease”?
Corrie = Coronation Street, the UK’s longest running TV soap which started in about 1960 and is still going strong. One of the main actors has cancer, apparently.
I apologize for the irrelevant nitpick, but thanks for the laugh.
I don’t think many Brits would have difficulty understanding it. Especially worldy-wise, cultured Guardian readers 
(Actually, on looking at it again, it’s perhaps a little less easy to immediately recognise what’s being said, as Big Easy doesn’t stand out due to the capitalisation of all words in the headline)
Even so, it’s a pretty cryptic headline, in a funny way. I would just say: “Authorities Dispute Timing of Return to New Orleans.”
British headline writers don’t tend to stick to straightforward ones like that. And crucially, the Guardian’s is ten characters shorter, and it’s easy to imagine a subeditor replacing ‘New Orleans’ with ‘Big Easy’ to make things fit into the available space more neatly. Especially as the Guardian moved to a smaller paper format only a week ago, and they’re no doubt still getting used to new layouts. These are all current Guardian headlines, all of which could be meaningless or cryptic to some people:
Clarke plans prisons shakeup
Hidden stress of the nursery age
Last of the Few see memorial unveiled
Oh, and the greatest headline of all time, which no doubt will be cryptic for most people:
Super Cally Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious
From the sports section of the Daily Record in Scotland, when lowly Inverness Caledonian Thistle (Cally Thistle) beat the Goliath of Celtic
One of my favourite headlines, but I’ve been telling everyone that it came from the Sun.
Googling gets mixed results, and threw this up too:
Sunday Times (South African version)
Oh, I nearly forgot this one: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=337901&cc=5739
(apologies for the annoying ESPN splash screen)