Investigating the murky reality behind the attack in Libya.

Arriving in China at 23, Sidney Rittenberg spent 35 years as a “friend, confidante, translator, and journalist” for the Communist Party’s top leaders. In this interview, he recalls both his friendship with Chairman Mao and the 16 years he spent in solitary confinement.

The rise and fall of the new oligarchs, who raided the Russian state. When Putin came to power most fled, but not Mikhail Khodorkovsky: “The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But Khodorkovsky forgot.”

A jailhouse interview with Vladimir Putin’s rival at the very end of his decade behind bars.

An exploited celebrity’s long journey home.

On the echoes between the world leading up to World War I and our present international trajectory. Then, as globalization, nationalism, and radicalism converged, and tensions within the Balkans served as a spark. Today, conflicts in the Middle East, whose borders were mostly drawn in the wake of World War I, could play a similar role.

After two years of filming Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole returns to his childhood home in Ireland.

Plus: 50 years later, Gay Talese remembers the late Peter O'Toole.

The story of Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez’s flight from Cuba.

The twisting paths that brought together Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald.

Brazil’s restless youth in the lead-up to the World Cup.

The journey from a Sudanese refugee camp to an Atlanta police academy.

Visiting Cambodia, and a Khmer Rouge prison camp, 30 years after the genocide.

In the ’90s, a gynecologist named Gao Yaojie exposed an AIDS epidemic in rural China and the ensuing government cover-up. Forced to leave, she’s now 85 and living alone in New York.

The conspiracy theories surrounding the 1931 death of Hitler’s niece and object of affection.

A Bosnian social psychologist who studies guilt and responsibility in the collective memory (and denial) of Sreberbica, which is “among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history.”

The death of a Russian dissident and how radioactive poison became a tool of assassins.

On Silvio Berlusconi’s hedonism.

Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.

An interview with a Mexican-born American attorney who defended and eventually smuggled for the cartels in the ’90s.

The fight to vaccinate children in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan as part of an attempt to eradicate polio worldwide.

Due to global warming, this island nation may cease to exist in 20 years.

On the assassination of a half-Palestinian, half-Jewish cultural revolutionary.

A pair of undercover journalists, a boatload of refugees, 200 miles of ocean and a journey that has claimed more than a thousand lives.

“Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn’t I would never believe he had existed.”

Returning to Forth Worth after two and a half defection years in the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald became friends with a Russian emigre family with a son of his age. After Kennedy was shot, they would be called on to translate the Secret Service interrogation of his young Russian wife.

Bibek Dhong traveled from Nepal to Malaysia to test cameras for the new iPhone 5. When production ended abruptly, he and his coworkers found themselves stranded for two months without money, food or passports.