Phillip Lafayette Gibbs met Dale Adams when they were in high school, in Ripley, Mississippi, a town best known as the home of William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who ran a slave plantation, fought in the Mexican-American War, raised troops that joined the Confederate Army, wrote a best-selling mystery about a murder on a steamboat, shot a man to death and got away with it...

Venezuela used to be one of the richest countries in South America, but it has spent the last 10 years engulfed in a political and economic crisis. What started as the gradual crumbling of the country’s economy in 2010 snowballed into a devastating avalanche of crime, corruption, and mass starvation, leaving millions of people in the country unable to feed themselves or access basic medical supplies. Ninety percent of Venezuelans are now living in poverty, and one of the most extreme and sustained periods of hyperinflation ever recorded means that people working minimum wage jobs are earning the equivalent of $5 a month.

Regina Brave remembers the moment the first viral picture of her was taken. It was 1973, and 32-year-old Brave had taken up arms in a standoff between federal marshals and militant Indigenous activists in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Brave had been assigned to guard a bunker on the front lines and was holding a rifle when a reporter leaped from a car to snap her photo.

To lure Sears into a Chicago suburb, officials crafted the largest tax break package ever awarded to a company in Illinois. It resulted in revenue shortfalls, disappearing jobs and unexpected tax burdens, a Daily Herald and ProPublica review showed.

In a crisis, what was once unthinkable can suddenly become inevitable. We’re in the middle of the biggest societal shakeup since the second world war. And neoliberalism is gasping its last breath. So from higher taxes for the wealthy to more robust government, the time has come for ideas that seemed impossible just months ago.

One of the ultimate symbols of luxury and affluence is private jet travel. From the dawn of the Learjet-era to today’s ultra-long-range large-cabin jets, the most wealthy people in the world enjoy the unparalleled freedom and privilege that private jets provide. For such an intriguing and vaunted domain, there are a lot of misconceptions about it and the finances required to play within it. With this in mind, we dive into what traveling on and even owning one of these flying 'time machines' really costs and why they are so popular.

Raul Razo and three buddies were knocking out their daily situps and pushups in their 72-man tank at the Harris County Jail in late March when they were overcome. All four were gasping for air. “Uno por uno. Uno por uno,” Razo told his wife in a phone call punctuated by dry coughs. One by one they’d abandoned their workout and slogged off to their bunks.

It’s hard to think of a symbol of COVID-19 more fraught than the N95 respirator. The mask fits tightly around the face and is capable of filtering 95% of airborne particles, such as viruses, from the air, which other protective equipment (such as surgical masks) can’t do. It’s a life-saving device that is now in dangerously short supply. As such, it has come to represent the extreme challenges of the global response to COVID-19.

You might not want to spend your quarantine in a city. But the rural places many Americans treat as playgrounds, and the workers who keep them running, will suffer for it.

As a kid growing up in northern Utah, Chet Olsen would often take his older brother’s shotgun shells, empty out the pellets, and spread them across a flat surface. He would then guide the pellets around, pretending that each one was a sheep he had to tend to. Olsen, now 62, has a salt-and-pepper mustache that accents his serious demeanor, and his boots display telltale signs of a lifetime of hard, hands-on work.

In 2010, Dung Nguyen, a 39-year-old Vietnamese fisherman living in Dickinson, Texas, decided to take his boat out early in the season. Peak shrimping in Texas’s Galveston Bay wouldn’t begin until mid-August, but Nguyen was saving to send his three children to college, so in April, he began heading out for four or five days at a time. Nguyen was accustomed to long days; he had come to America as a refugee in 1992 and had saved for years to buy his first boat.

Just like our education and healthcare systems, our information supply has been heavily commercialised in the past decades. Truth has become a product, aimed at satisfying a need. The advent of digital capitalism turned truth into whatever makes you click.

The long read: The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes

Baba Ramdev renounced the material world. So why is he selling toothpaste, instant noodles, and toilet cleaner?

This animal liberation group actually wants to be put on trial. Their goal: force jurors to wear VR headsets and immerse them in the suffering of animals bound for slaughter.

Unless you are given to chronic anxiety or suffer from nihilistic despair, you probably haven’t spent much time contemplating the bottom of the ocean. Many people imagine the seabed to be a vast expanse of sand, but it’s a jagged and dynamic landscape with as much variation as any place onshore. Mountains surge from underwater plains, canyons slice miles deep, hot springs billow through fissures in rock, and streams of heavy brine ooze down hillsides, pooling into undersea lakes.

Ghil’ad Zuckermann has found that resurrecting lost languages may bring many benefits to indigenous populations – with knock-on effects for their health and happiness.

An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells 'Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.' Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.

Last August, during the second-hottest year on record, while the fires in the Amazon rainforest were raging, the ice sheet in Greenland was melting, and Greta Thunberg was being greeted by adoring crowds across the U.S., something else happened that was of great relevance to the climate movement: An attorney who has been battling Chevron for more than a decade over environmental devastation in South America was put on house arrest.

While Nike’s Vaporfly Next has survived a ban from the 2020 Olympics, any future versions of the shoe will be outlawed. And the trainers have changed running forever.