As it approaches a public offering, how Glencore—founded by the legendary fugitive March Rich—cornered the market for just about everything by working with dictators and spies.

On spending six months on the southern coast of Argentina with the “Jane Goodall of penguins” and several hundred of her research subjects.

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

On the Daily Mail’s dominance of England.

A report from the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk—a.k.a. “The Last Nazi”—who died on March 17.

Sam Childers, a Pennsylvania-based evangelical preacher, biker, and former drug addict, has devoted his life to catching crazed African warlord Joseph Kony.

The story of a young man on the run in the slum he dreams of escaping.

When 25-year-old Valentine Strasser seized power in Sierra Leone in 1992, he became the world’s youngest head of state. Today he lives with his mother and spends his days drinking gin by the roadside.

Hanging out in Moscow with Russia’s yuppie, 20-something journalist revolutionaries:

In other words, the protest was being brought to you by the same people you would have relied on, weeks earlier, for restaurant picks.

Looking for holes in the world’s nuclear security.

A portrait of Czech President Václav Havel as he left office.

On Bangkok’s Khao San Road.

On the arrival of Formula 1 in India.

On Michael Lewis and the global financial crisis.

Previously: The Michael Lewis World Tour of Economic Collapse

A profile of Seif Qaddafi.

On the life, legacy, and last days of Muammar Qaddafi.

On the battles, both between humans and animals, in Africa’s overpopulated Albertine Rift.

Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house.

On the life and afterlife of Che Guevara.

How an Italian thug looted MGM, brought Credit Lyonnais to its knees, and made the Pope cry.

On the railways of China and a trip aboard its latest spectacle, a $32 billion line carrying passengers between Shanghai and Beijing at 170 MPH.

On a group of teenage believers raised in settlements on the West Bank:

They say it takes one generation to found a new language. These girls are a new language, believing that they belong to the land on which they were born, and sponsored by the government they despise, which pays for their roads and electricity.

Inside the safe houses where Syrian youth protesters have retreated since the uprising:

Around his neck he wore a tiny toy penguin that was actually a thumb drive, which he treated like a talisman, occasionally squeezing it to make sure it was still there. I sat next to him on the mattress and watched as he traded messages with other activists on Skype, then updated a Facebook page that serves as an underground newspaper, then marked a Google Earth map of Homs with the spots of the latest unrest. “If there’s no Internet,” Abdullah said, “there’s no life.”

China’s new generation of neocon nationalists.

On FIFA’s history of scandal.