Has Mexico become a failed state?

No one really knows the script for days like these, and neither did we.

A 12,000-word profile of recently departed Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva, the “most successful politician of his time.”

On the ground in post-disaster Japan.

How smartphones are changing a continent.

The surreal afterlife of the once-ascendant Dubai, where “the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.”

A first-person account of the author’s time spent volunteering with a group of Burmese activists in Thailand, who turn out to be not Korean but in fact Karen, members of Burma’s persecuted ethnic minority. In the course of her time there, they show her videos of their risky forays across the border, and she shows them MySpace.

The perilous routes through which information—video footage, secret documents, radio broadcasts—flow in and out of North Korea through its porous borders with China.

After nearly 15 years in a Peruvian prison, an American woman convicted of aiding a Marxist terrorist group finds parole in Lima full of contradictions.

On the future of the liberal Israeli newspaper Haartez.

First-person accounts from the 2004 siege of a Russian school in Beslan by Chechen terrorists.

One of most popular Libyan figures amongst Western intellectuals and democracy advocates is… Qaddafi’s second son, Saif.

A profile of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the Malibu-dwelling, “fantastically corrupt” dictator-in-waiting of Equatorial Guinea. Teodorin, as his friends call him, is considered by U.S. intelligence to be “an unstable, reckless idiot.”

Twenty-five years later, inside the Exclusion Zone.

A suitcase was smuggled from Spain to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War containing negatives from three photographers would later become legends and all die in war zones. The suitcase disappeared.

On Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, “the permanent revolutionary,” and his son Seif.

Omar Mohammed (most certainly not his real name), a former Iraqi cop, is widely believed to be the most skilled and prolific terrorist hunter alive. Recently, he personally killed two of Al-Qaeda’s senior commanders in Iraq. He has already been shot and blown up, and with U.S. forces on their way out, his chances of survival in Baghdad are slim.

The Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, drawn mostly from kidnapped children, has proved as elusive as it is barbaric.

In 2006, seven men stole £53m. Six were caught, but more than half the money remains at large. On modern money laundering best practices.

How an Iraqi expat conned the United States, without ever once being interviewed by an American official, into making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. “Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq.”

The story of three months spent training reporters in Saudi Arabia, where the press is far from free. “I suspected that behind the closed gates of Saudi society there was a social revolution in the making. With some guidance, I thought, these journalists could help inspire change.”

An opinion piece on the structural causes of unrest in Egypt; the business fraternity, globalization, and the fate of Egyptian women.

On the Cairo knifing of 82-year-old Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and its aftermath.

February 1st, 2011. Tahrir Square, Cairo.