On Tse Chi Lop, “the Jeff Bezos of the drug trade” and ringleader of a $21-billion crime syndicate.

Against all predictions, the Taliban took the Afghan capital in a matter of hours. This is the story of why and what came after, by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.

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.

How Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya came to challenge her country’s dictatorship.

Inside an international smuggling operation.

Inside the right-wing romance With Hungary.

American anti-trafficking groups often make impossible-to-verify claims. Now, they’re doing it in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Faced with fragility and uncertainty, gig workers around the world are connecting across borders to challenge platforms’ power and policies.

The CIA plan to grab or kill Julian Assange before a theoretical escape to Moscow.

How India disenfranchises Muslims.

In the bloody civil war, Khaled al-Halabi switched sides. But what country does he really serve?

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

A man is presumed murdered. In this town of 12, everyone is a possible suspect.

“The cowboy hats, target practice, and barbecue brisket were just a bonus. They were really there for the deregulated electrical grid.”

It seemed like an easy crime to stop: protected Indonesian rainforest, cut for coffee farms. But a globalized economy can undermine even the best-laid plans.

“The remains of a sunken village nearby make me realize that the process is inexorable. Of this seventy-five-house village, there is almost nothing left.”

In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future.

Qaddafi’s son is alive. And he wants to take Libya back.

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.

An Australian slaughterhouse dispute shone a light on a system designed to exploit migrant workers’ hopes and ambitions.

The U.S. military openly admitted to killing Somali civilians but won’t return their emails or issue reparations.

How a baby-faced CEO turned a Farmville clone into a massive Ponzi scheme.

Wih Alexey Navalny in prison, one of his closest aides is carrying on the lonely work of the opposition.

A nation’s uncertain future.

A celebrated Uyghur writer gives a first-person account of the genocide in Xinjiang.