“Will you show me all of the man-in-the-street, sympathetic, mayoral candidates? The last time I met one of them on the subway was a long time ago. Let’s not get too carried away.”

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.

The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world. The story of a neonatal nurse helps illustrate why.

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.

Last year, the U.S. state department said it had uncovered a fake embassy in Accra that had been issuing a stream of forged visas. The story went viral. It was wrong.

In El Salvador, Jucuapa is home to dozens of small factories that churn out what some locals call the “wooden pajamas.”

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.

On the revolutionaries, highly-paid negotiators, former spies, foreign businessmen and their families, who all played roles in the massive Colombian kidnap and ransom industry during its 1990s heyday.

For the Zulu club, a black social organization in New Orleans, Mardi Gras was a joy. The coronavirus made it a tragedy.

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.

An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.

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.

In the 1950s, L.S.D. became a Beverly Hills’ therapy fad, and it profoundly changed idols like Cary Grant.

A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track... Months later, Luger — who says he was “broke as a joke” by that point, about to become a father for the second time and seriously considering taking a job stocking boxes in a warehouse — heard that same beat on the radio, transformed into a Waka song called “Hard in da Paint.” Before long, he couldn’t get away from it.

Lauren spent six years of her childhood locked in a closet, starved and tortured by her birth mother and stepfather. Miraculously, she survived; that’s when her long road to recovery began.

On Colombia’s “macabre alliance”:

In February 2003, the mayor of a small town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast stood up at a nationally televised meeting with then President Álvaro Uribe and announced his own murder.

On secrets that surprise no one:

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

A profile of new Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard, who in another life was a touring musician and hated Ticketmaster just like everyone else.

“It’s an old book!” Harper Lee told a mutual friend of ours who’d seen her while I was in Monroeville. “But if someone wants to read it, fine!”

They were cousins who grow up in Raqqa amidst parties, beaches, even bikinis. They married ISIS fighters to protect their families, then became morality policers.

An important house in Florida history is for sale, its future uncertain. Some want the historic house preserved, while the racism that fueled the Rosewood riots remains.

A massive raid on a long-running cockfighting ring in Arkansas has raised complex questions about ICE, immigration, and the future of a centuries-old tradition.