Fourteen people connected to resistance of Vladimir Putin have died on British soil. Every case has been closed, the deaths deemed of natural causes. American intelligence believes they were all assassinated by the Kremlin.

An anatomy of a failure.

A bullfighter’s comeback after a brutal goring.

After their mother was deported to Mexico, the Marin siblings faced an impossible choice: Stay or go.

One morning in mid-December, a group of soldiers banged on the door of a house in eastern Aleppo. A male voice responded from inside: “Who are you?” A soldier answered: “We’re the Syrian Arab Army. It’s O.K., you can come out. They’re all gone.” The door opened. A middle-aged man appeared. He had a gaunt, distinguished face, but his clothes were threadbare and his teeth looked brown and rotted. At the soldiers’ encouragement, he stepped hesitantly forward into the street. He explained to them, a little apologetically, that he had not crossed his threshold in four and a half years.

A talk from the re:publica conference in Berlin:

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it. The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.

In 1936, Karp Lykov whisked his family into the Siberian wilderness to escape Bolshevik persecution. They remained there, alone, until discovered by a helicopter crew in 1978.

Bangalore was once the icon of a globalized, high tech, utopian future. Now it’s a sign of global catastrophe.

To support their families back home, women from the Philippines have found work and a new way of life in Israel. But at what price?

How did an obscure artist who survived the Cultural Revolution become a viral sensation and suddenly the surreal, sexy center of Fashion Week?

To be mentally ill in Ghana.

The diary of a Scranton, PA National Guardsmen tasked with guarding the highest profile prisoner in U.S history: a surprisingly amiable Saddam Hussein.

In the fall of 2015, Germany designated Sumte, population 102, as a sanctuary for nearly 800 refugees. What followed was a living experiment in the country’s principles.

A primer.

Every year, thousands of teenagers from one city in Nigeria risk death and endure forced labor and sex work on the long route to Europe.

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

The annual tradition in the grape-growing country of South Africa’s Western Cape was that locals could gather fruit before it rotted on the vine. But this season produced a body amongst the rows.

In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country. The patients, doctors say, seem to have lost the will to live.

The city’s radical pro-democracy movement faces a stiff test from Mainland China.

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

How $100 million in diamonds, gold, and jewelry disappeared from Antwerp Diamond Center’s super-secure vault.

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.

On what lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and what lies ahead.

Banned in Russia and cut by Condé Nast from the GQ website, this story (presented in full) details the intrigue behind the Moscow apartment bombings, blamed on Chechens, that allowed Putin to rapidly ascend to power.