A semi-retired Russian three-star general oversaw the cross-border movements of a rocket launcher used to bring down a passenger jet in 2014 over eastern Ukraine, killing all aboard, an investigation by a team of reporting outlets has found. The reporting team, made up of McClatchy and investigative websites Bellingcat (based in London) and The Insider (based in Moscow), identifies the general as Nikolai Fedorovich Tkachev.

The historian carried secrets too heavy for one man to bear. He packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: the 1 terabyte hard drive with his evidence against the Islamic State group, an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, and, a keepsake, the first book from Amazon delivered to Mosul. He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city.

The long read: When two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin invited their classmate for a game of hide-and-seek in the forest, they planned to murder her. They later claimed they were forced to act by the mythical Slender Man

Buildings aren’t supposed to burn the way London’s Grenfell Tower did. This is what it felt like to fight a fire burning at 1,800 degrees—and to flee it. (3800 words, about 40 min)

When the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic. Álvaro Pereira was working as a family doctor in Olhão in southern Portugal. “People were injecting themselves in the street, in public squares, in gardens,” he told me. “At that time, not a day passed when there wasn’t a robbery at a local business, or a mugging.”

As politicians dither over repairs, the risk of fire, flood or a deluge of sewage only increases. But fixing the Palace of Westminster might change British politics for good – which is the last thing many of its residents want. By Charlotte Higgins

In recent years, Europe has experienced a record influx of asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in Syria and other predominantly Muslim countries. This wave of Muslim migrants has prompted debate about immigration and security policies in numerous countries and has raised questions about the current and future number of Muslims in Europe.

Across the US, people go to Massage Envy spas in search of a soothing, affordable escape. More than 180 people say what they got instead was sexual assault. But the billion-dollar company says that’s not its problem to solve. A BuzzFeed News investigation.

Amid the museum’s 2 million works of art lie numerous mathematical curiosities

James Bridle writing his thoughts on some of the different aspects of what is colloquially being referred to by some as ElsaGate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate)

When biologist Luis Zambrano began his career in the late 1990s, he pictured himself working miles from civilization, maybe discovering new species in some hidden corner of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Instead, in 2003, he found himself counting amphibians in the polluted, murky canals of Mexico City’s Xochimilco district. The job had its advantages: he was working minutes from his home and studying the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), a national icon in Mexico and arguably the world’s most recognizable salamander. But in that first year, Zambrano couldn’t wait for it to be over.

After a drumbeat of transit disasters this year, it became impossible to ignore the failures of the New York City subway system. A rush-hour Q train careened off the rails in southern Brooklyn. A track fire on the A line in Upper Manhattan sent nine riders to the hospital. A crowded F train stalled in a downtown tunnel, leaving hundreds in the dark without air-conditioning for nearly an hour. As the heat of packed-together bodies fogged the windows, passengers beat on the walls and clawed at the doors in a scene from a real-life horror story.

As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

On Oct. 1, 1977, my parents, my two sisters, and I boarded a Lufthansa plane in the dead of night in Bombay. We were dressed in new, heavy, uncomfortable clothes and had been seen off by our entire extended family, who had come to the airport with garlands and lamps; our foreheads were anointed with vermilion. We were going to America. To get the cheapest tickets, our travel agent had arranged a circuitous journey in which we disembarked in Frankfurt, then were to take an internal flight to Cologne, and onward to New York.

A new power is loose in the world. It is nowhere and yet it’s everywhere. It knows everything about us – our movements, our thoughts, our desires, our fears, our secrets, who our friends are, our financial status, even how well we sleep at night. We tell it things that we would not whisper to another human being. It shapes our politics, stokes our appetites, loosens our tongues, heightens our moral panics, keeps us entertained (and therefore passive).

For the entirety of recorded history, humans have worshipped nuclear fusion. It's gone by different names over the millennia, of course: the Egyptians called it Ra, the Greeks called it Helios, and the Aztecs knew it as Tonatiuh. Today, most of us know it as the Sun, but leading physicists around the world regard it with the same sense of awe as our ancient ancestors. This is not because these physicists believe the Sun rides across the sky in a giant reed boat...

Israeli colonists flooded, Tuesday, dozens of Palestinian olive trees with sewage water, in Deir al-Hatab town, east of the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Coordinator of the Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights organization in the occupied West Bank, Zakaria al-Sidda, said the colonists flooded the olive orchards near Elon Moreh illegal colony. He added that the Palestinian owners of the olive orchards have been isolated from them, and are only allowed to reach them twice a year through special permits and coordination.

When elderly immigrants fall prey to fraudsters promising protective blessings, their life savings are spirited away.

The long read: Davon Mayer was a smalltime dealer in west Baltimore who made an illicit deal with local police. When they turned on him, he decided to get out – but escaping that life would not prove as easy as falling into it

JOHN SHERIDAN STOOD ANKLE DEEP in the lush grass of his farm tracing the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic with his finger across the skyline. “I’m being shoved back into a corner,” he said, following its path in a 270-degree arc. “There’s a young lad there,” he said, waving in the direction of his 22-year-old son, Chris. “He doesn’t remember what it was like when there was a border.”