What if soldiers from ‘Kill Team’ (and others who have murdered innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq) aren’t simply the “few bad apples” that military writes them off as?

How detectives from Scotland Yard, Romania, Germany, and Italy nabbed the so-called Mission: Impossible gang, which pulled off a string of daring warehouse heists.

As U.S. troops departed, Baghdad in ruins.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. While on assignment for the New York Times, Anthony Shadid died today in Syria.

Peggy Jo Tallas spent most of her adult life doing two things: taking care of her ailing mother and robbing bank after bank dressed as a pudgy, bearded cowboy.

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.

Speaking to a group that started their college lives in September, 2001, the host of The Daily Show embraces how difficult the real world is:

I want to address is the idea that somehow this new generation is not as prepared for the sacrifice and the tenacity that will be needed in the difficult times ahead. I have not found this generation to be cynical or apathetic or selfish. They are as strong and as decent as any people that I have met. And I will say this, on my way down here I stopped at Bethesda Naval, and when you talk to the young kids that are there that have just been back from Iraq and Afghanistan, you don’t have the worry about the future that you hear from so many that are not a part of this generation but judging it from above.

Elegy for Aleppo.

On serving time for crimes not yet committed.

Calculating restitution for victims of child pornography.

On being—and playing for—Lady Vols basketball coach Pat Summitt.

Searching for sanctuary with American war deserters.

One woman’s hunt for possibility after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Should art be a battleground for social justice?

Looking for answers while camping with an abusive father.

Is a Marine responsible for a series of violent attacks against women?

For a half-century fires have burned under Centralia, PA.

Has global warming made it harder for environmentalists to care about conservation?

A man’s search for his kidnapped children in India and Nepal.

A hunt for maple poachers in Western Washington.

A trip to India for total silence.

A profile of Alan Adler, the guy behind the Aerobie and the beloved AeroPress.