The biggest slum in struggling Ghana is bounded by a burning dump and a sewage channel. Meet the hustlers, builders, prostitutes, entrepreneurs, bad boys, and dreamers who live there, illegally but cheaply, gambling that they’ll come out better than when they went in.

As climate change makes the role of inmate firefighters in California increasingly crucial, Americans are beginning to ask whether the type of low-level offenders who qualify for the program even deserve to be locked up.

Magicians, Mafiosos, a Missing Painting, and the Heist of a Lifetime

Marcos Aurélio Nunes da Cruz, the boy who was like a little bird, died in his sleep. His cardboard deathbed sat under the concrete awning of a discount supermarket. His killer had approached at 3 a.m. The man, who wore a black helmet, glanced around, paused for a few seconds, pulled out a handgun and shot Cruz once in the left side of his forehead.

It was already nearly 4 a.m. on a sticky June night in 2008, and the LaGuardia Houses on the Lower East Side were crawling with cops. It was the kind of situation Neal normally prefers to avoid. Where police are, he'd rather not be.

It’s a few days before the May 25 European Parliament elections, and the streets of Budapest are awash with colorful campaign posters urging Hungarians to vote for delegates to represent their country in Brussels. It would be a shining display of democracy in action, a comforting reminder of Hungary’s 10-year membership in the European Union after decades of repressive communist rule, if not for the fact that almost all the signs are for one party—the ruling populist-right Fidesz.

He's spent decades dodging the law. He's escaped from jail twice by helicopter. He's given millions to the poor. This is the story of how Greece’s most wanted man became a folk hero.

Break out the "Arrrrr, me hearties!" because today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day! But where does our idea of pirate speech come from?

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse.

Fifteen years ago, a mysterious Greek entrepreneur bought and resold a series of tiny islands off the coast of Nicaragua, setting off a bizarre and tragic chain of events that included a reality-TV sensation and allegations of an insidious murder plot. The ensuing chaos brought to light a centuries-old question: Who does land really belong to?

Last summer a trim guy with wavy brown hair, high cheekbones, and a broad smile could be found making Whoppers, working the drive-through window, and scrubbing bathrooms at a Burger King in Miami. His name was Daniel Schwartz. He learned to make a Whopper in less than 35 seconds and blended in well with his fellow employees, except for the fact that Schwartz had a guy with a video camera trailing him. “I cleaned about 15 toilets in the past two days,” he boasted at one point, as if he’d just com

On a remote island, a rich former executive and his wife wait for the world to end. They want others to join – but it's a one-way trip.

A German man claims to be an Indian chief in the Amazon rainforest. His tales of El Dorado even impressed Steven Spielberg and Jacques Cousteau. His tales would be harmless if there were three unsolved deaths connected to his fantasy world.

How did a well-trained crew of professional hotshots come to abandon their designated safety zone and walk into a 40-foot-high wall of fire?

On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message. “Bro.” The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread. Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

In Washington state, a 10- and 11-year-old were sentenced to years in a detention facility after being caught with weapons and claiming they were going to murder other kids at their school.

Residents of Terlingua mourned the murder of the town's most popular bar owner. Then, as conflicting accounts of the victim and his last night emerged, they started picking sides.

Princeton’s near-upset of Georgetown in a 1989 first-round game made sure Cinderella would always get invited to the ball.

In 1982 three teenagers were killed near the shores of Lake Waco in a seemingly inexplicable crime. More than three decades later, the tragic and disturbing case still casts a long, dark shadow.

Twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Grove is a member of a small, insular, and eccentric church in East Texas. Her parents think she’s being brainwashed. She insists she’s being saved.