Unregulated dams across Texas are increasingly failing—putting people and property in jeopardy.

Fred Steese served more than 20 years in prison for the murder of a Vegas circus performer even though evidence proved he didn’t do it. When the truth came to light, he was offered a confounding deal: he could go free, but only if he agreed to remain a convicted killer.

Local communities are taking the world’s largest polluters to court. And they’re using the legal strategy that got tobacco companies to pay up.

“After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.”

A false confession to bad cops put a man in prison for rape and murder. But even conclusive DNA evidence hasn’t gotten him out.

Foursquare and Gowalla are in a VC-funded race to become the dominant location-based social network. But their founders say both companies have a larger purpose.

Maurice Spagnoletti was hired to clean up one of the island’s largest banks. He found fraud, waste, and executives performing Santeria rituals in the conference room. Then he was killed on his way home.

Washington state’s redoubled climate goals and fresh action plan revive hope to cut emissions. But ongoing fossil fuel development in BC could undercut Cascadia’s progress.

If you’re one of four million Ahmadis in Pakistan, posting on Facebook can mean exposing yourself to danger.

A 90-year-old amateur archaeologist who claimed to have detonated the first atomic bomb was also one of the most prolific grave robbers in modern American history.

“If Sullivan High School had a motto, it would be ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Its immigrant population now numbers close to 300—45 percent of the school’s 641 students—and many are refugees new to this country. This academic year alone, the Rogers Park school has welcomed a staggering 89 refugees—nearly three times as many as last year and far more than at any other high school in the city.”

How Michael Manos, a.k.a. the Glam Scammer, a career con man who relied on a combination of fake reality TV shows and fake fundraisers to bilk people in Atlanta, Dallas, and D.C., finally got caught.

On returning to Lagos after years abroad.

It is always understood when you leave Nigeria as a Nigerian that you will return at some point.

In pre-modern poetry, Shakespeare, who mentioned everything, would probably have name checked products if he could, but there were few goods with the maker’s name on them: though he would specify the street or town which had given origin to a certain cut of sleeve.

How a traveling medical technician managed to steal narcotics from hospitals, infecting at least 45 people with hepatitis C in the process.

On the final two holdouts in Treece, Kansas, a former mining town that is soon to be wiped off the maps.

Representative Matt Shea has been trying to create a libertarian utopia in the Pacific Northwest, a 51st state called Liberty. And he keeps getting re-elected.

The impossible task of touring a tractor factory in post-Soviet Belarus.

Debates surrounding physician-assisted dying in the U.S.

Exploring remote atolls in the South Pacific.

A coffee maven—and Frappuccino inventor—attempts a comeback in the cafe business.

Looking for holes in the world’s nuclear security.

AIDS activism in the “after” years.