When David Sneddon disappeared hiking around western China, officials chalked it up to a drowning. A decade later, it appears he had been kidnapped and taken to North Korea.

A former ambassador to China and potential 2012 GOP candidate on the power of optimism:

Remember others. The greatest exercise for the human heart isn't jogging or aerobics or weight lifting – it's reaching down and lifting another up. Find a cause larger than yourself, then speak out and take action. Never let it be said that you were too timid or too weak to stand by your cause. Learn what it feels like to give 100 percent to others. It’ll change your life.

A year living in a shack in Oakland.

A man in a small town in India builds local power by owning the only computer in his village.

The AIDS crisis as it unfolded in America is an object lesson in the danger, the potential violence, inherent in organized prejudice.

Rolf Kaestel stole $264 in 1981. He’s still in jail.

Ending a pregnancy in the most “pro-life” state in America.

In 1998, at age 45, Ken Bradshaw surfed the tallest wave in recorded history.

How one girl saved a football season in a small, rural town in Texas.

In 2009, 300 people perished in an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. Next week, six Italian scientists and one government official will stand trial for manslaughter.

Truancy is punishable by fines, probation, and in some cases throwing parents in prison. Does any of that really keep kids in school?

Born in Germany, raised in Montana, now living in New York, comedian Reggie Watts describes his style as “culture sampling.”

An American, born into privilege, became a bootleg DVD kingpin in Shanghai and then, in an unprecedented development, landed in Chinese prison.

On the rescue in July of two children from a burning apartment in southern France.

A trip to a grave in Damascus as shelling started in Homs.

A day in the economic life of the Nairobi’s Kibera, the largest shanty-town in Africa.

Visiting his daughter in San Francisco, the author longs for food delivery in Manhattan.

Finding a saint in a leprosy settlement in Hawaii.

On Lucille Miller, who in San Bernadino in 1964 was convicted of burning her husband to death in his Volkswagen.

Adventures in the cosmetics department of a Neiman Marcus in Dallas.

In which the author’s wife attempts to break the world record in Tetris.

In short order, eight gay men in Texas were murdered by teenage boys.