How Sinclair Broadcast Group bent the rules, bought politicians, and faked the news to become one of the largest independent owners of television stations in America.

Colin Powell’s battle with the Bush administration.

A profile of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

A profile of embattled White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

Li Dao, a young Minnesota nurse, appeared in suicide chat rooms, contacted the most desperate, and made pacts to die with them via webcam. After some in the forum caught on, Dao disappeared; or rather, Dao had never existed at all. She was a middle-aged man. And he may have encouraged and witnessed dozens of live suicides.

As CEO of HBO, Chris Albrecht was responsible for putting The Wire, The Sopranos, and Sex and the City on the air. Then he choked his girlfriend outside a Vegas casino, got fired, and took a job running Starz.

Inside the conflict that has caused more deaths than any since WWII—with no end in sight.

A report from Camp Hope, the tent city that’s sprung up next to the Chilean mine where 33 men have been trapped since early August.

Four years after a disastrous MTV performance had led him to avoid the public, Rose was back on stage.

The relative prosperity of the Putin-era has thrown Russian bride-introduction tours for a loop, as a group of American bachelors learn in a series of Meet and Greets.

Not long ago, Rand Paul, opthalmologist and son of Ron, would have been written off as a wacky extremist. Thanks to his Dad and the Tea Partiers, he’s poised to become the most radical member of the U.S Senate.

An oral history of Goodfellas.

Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin was so prolific that even he doesn’t know how many he killed.

Christian Audigier is the man behind Von Dutch and Ed Hardy. The massive succes of his garish and expensive creations may say more about the power of celebrity than about fashion.

Lessons learned while temping at an Amsterdam coffee shop.

How sex scandals have made Silvio Berlusconi even more powerful in Italy.

A writer for Conan O’Brien on how The Tonight Show really ended and on how his boss got screwed.

Bill Murray grants a rare interview and appears to admit, among other things, that he occasionally approaches strangers from behind on the streets of NYC, puts his hands over their eyes, and says “guess who.”

An hour-by-hour account of the explosion and rescue effort on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

In need of a new lead singer, Journey settled on an unknown 40-year-old from the Philippines whose clips they found online. Arnel Pineda was perfect: just a small-town boy, living in a lonely world.

How the National Enquirer became a 2010 Pulitzer contender without straying from its roots as a supermarket tabloid.

Step 1: awkward high school senior passes himself off as a flirtatious female student online. Step 2: he cons his male classmates into e-mailing him sexually explicit images of themselves. Step 3: extortion.

In the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight, Marvin Harrison, the man who holds the NFL record for receptions in a season, may find himself with a permanent record of a different sort.

According to Lou Dobbs, we’re wrong about his stance on illegal immigrants, wrong about why he quit CNN, and wrong about his presidential aspirations. Well, we might actually be right about that last thing.