How the Syrian president stays in power.

A filmmaker goes to court to fight the television commercial break.

A weekend with the only person on Earth who can survive five venomous snakebites in 48 hours.

The story of a sheriff’s deputy in Minnesota who took his own life.

"If anything happens to me," Ruettimann said, "give this to the reporter." After Ruettimann's death, Hereaux took the file down off his desk. Inside was a thick stack of loose-leaf documents, a manila folder stuffed with letters, and a catalog-size clasp envelope labeled "Reports." Written in black permanent marker in the margin of the envelope was the reporter's name: mine.

In 1980, a bankrupt gambler came up with a plan to get his money back. He built an incredibly complex bomb, one that was impossible to defuse and that only he knew how to move, and snuck it into a Lake Tahoe casino with an extortion note demanding $3 million. Part of the plan worked. Part of it did not.

He was fired from the company he helped create, YouSendIt. Then the cyberattacks started.

On the evening of November 7th 1974, the 7th Earl of Lucan, an inveterate gambler and Backgammon champion with a taste for power boats, snuck into his estranged wife’s basement. He then bludgeoned their nanny with a lead pipe and placed her in a canvas sack, before attempting to murder his wife. Recognizing his voice, she convinced him that she could him escape, then slipped out a bathroom window. Lord Lucan was never seen again.

How Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and his Airbus A320 landed safely in the Hudson.

On reservations, where policing hardly exists, bruiser-for-hire vigilantes are often the first choice for justice.

After an election deadlock that held the country hostage for months, two former rivals confront Afghanistan’s patronage and corruption.

The bloody, often surreal, fight for Kosovo’s independence was led by a man moonlighting as a roofer in Switzerland.

A travelogue through the contradiction-rich and predominantly Muslim Southern Thailand.

Thea Hunter was a promising, brilliant scholar. And then she got trapped in academia’s permanent underclass.

Big-riggers who make sometimes less than minimum wage are locked legal fights with the unregulated leasing industry.

To understand the state’s urban-rural divide, start by looking at Yamhill County’s proposed walking trail.

Since she first started working in the hospitality industry two decades ago, Vida Afram has cleaned nearly 60,000 hotel rooms.

As a right-wing terrorist cell went on a seven-year killing spree, did authorities look the other way?

John Ackerman has spent millions procuring a majority of the known caves in Minnesota, which add up to dozens of miles of underground passageways and likely make him the largest cave owner in the U.S. He collects and charts them in the name of preservation, but his controversial methods have created many opponents.

Harland Sanders left home when he was 13. He once gunned a man down in the street for painting over one of his signs. During the war, he fed the scientists who created the atomic bomb. And then, in his 60s and going by the moniker Colonel Sanders, he began selling fried chicken.