"Follow the money". This famous phrase has inspired generations of investigative reporters.

She was known for dressing like a man and wearing a false beard, and was more powerful than either of her more famous female successors, Nefertiti and Cleopatra.

Armed gangs are seizing children for ransom payments in the lawless north of the Central African Republic.

A chance meeting in a White House waiting room sparked a young, almost adolescent journalist's friendship with an FBI agent, and this friendship would change their country forever.

The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency's worst illegal abuses. Among them: the confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s; assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro; wiretapping and surveillance of journalists; behaviour modification experiments on "unwitting" US citizens.

The 12.000 inhabitants of the town of Mourenx live in horizontal blocks if they are married, in towers if they are single. The married quarter consists of identical houses, symmetrically divided between two families.

The quiet revolt of Berlin actor Wolfgang Neuss, who in 1963 placed a notice in the paper "Der Abend"vgiving away the identity of the killer in a television serial that had been keeping the masses in suspense for weeks.

In a social experiment highly unusual for this most unplanned of countries, the Indian government has handpicked Nagpur, relatively small, forgettable city, to be fattened and primped into an international metropolis.

Researchers are investigating a long unknown killing field in Cambodia with the graves of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims from the 1970s. But local villagers found it first. By the time the researchers arrived last week, some 200 graves had been dug open and the bones scattered through the woods by hundreds of people hunting for jewelry. After the assault on the burial ground, the village seemed filled with remorse and dread. Several people said they had been awakened at night by screams from the graves.

Passannante earned a place in Italian history by trying to assassinate King Umberto I of Savoy; he was subsequently arrested, tortured and received a death sentence, later reduced to life in prison. As further punishment his entire family was jailed and Passannante's hometown, formerly known as Salvia, was forced to change its name to Savoia di Lucania. He went insane. In 1910 he was sent to an asylum and died shortly after. It was at that point that his head and brain were removed to be studied by sociologists.

A man manages to run away from a village attacked by the Janjaweed militia. But his wife, eight months pregnant, is still in the village, along with their four children, ages 3 to 12. ''There's no way for people to escape. The Janjaweed will rape and kill my family, and there's nothing I can do.”

A pop singer sets out to save the world, and scores an early success by leading an international campaign to free an Iranian teenage girl from a date with the hangman.

A company develops a robotic sentry to guard the border between North and South Korea. It is equipped with two cameras and a machine gun.

When World Bank President took over at the Bank in mid-2005, his ladyfriend - then a Bank employee for eight years - was transferred to work for the US State Department, to avoid any conflict of interest. But rapid rises in her tax-free World Bank salary to about $193,000 - more than the $186,000 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice receives before tax - have aroused ire among other Bank employees.

The US has banned exports of iPods, fine wines and fast cars to North Korea as part of the punishment for the country's nuclear bomb test last year. (The sanctions are said to be targeted at North Korea's elite, who reportedly enjoy luxuries despite the country's desperate poverty.)

Diplomatic postings are highly sought-after jobs in North Korea, and are only given to the most loyal supporters of the regime. However, once overseas, diplomats' exposure to foreign thinking brings them under official suspicion in secretive North Korea.

The Sabian Mandaeans - one of the oldest religious groups in the world, pacifists, followers of Adam, Noah and John the Baptist. - are facing extinction. Islamic extremists are trying to wipe them out through forced conversions, rape and murder.

An indigenous Indian tribe thought to have died out more than half a century ago is "resurrected" when about 250 people living on a remote mountain range near the border with Peru are identified as members of the long-lost Naua tribe. The tribe had been thought to have become extinct in the 1920s.

An ex-KGB officer dies of radiation poisoning attributed to polonium-210.

A journalist, a critic of the government and in particular of the war the government carries on, is shot dead.

One of the longest-serving spies of the Cold War era is now an octogenarian woman who spends her days making jam in her south London home.

The government proposes a monitoring centre that would eavesdrop on telephone, internet and other communications. The government defends the proposal in the name of national security, to protect people from organised crime.

For 60 years, a German archive documenting Nazi war crimes helped survivors of the Holocaust trace missing relatives but the archive was closed to the public. There are 17 million names in it. The Nazis recorded everything; from the number of lice on a prisoner's head to the exact moment of execution. There is very personal information, too: names of collaborators, homosexuals and prostitutes. Now, 60 years after the end of the war, many feel they should be opened.

Jesus married Mary magdalene and they had a child, and that blood line survives to this day.

Citizens let slip the memory of a slain leader: twenty years after having their president gunned down, the anniversary is an ordinary day for most of the people.

More than 200 political activists defy a police ban to demonstrate and to engage in their forbidden action: eating "pig soup" in public. With steaming bowls of the fragrant broth soon passing through the crowd, they sing their racuous chant: "we are all pig eaters!"

A secret report says the Mexican military carried out a genocide plan of kidnapping, torturing and killing hundreds of supposed subversives during the so-called dirty war from the 1960s to the early 1980s.

Danish Muslim imams or religious chiefs talk of reconciliation when speaking in Danish in Danish broadcasting networks. But in Arabic, according to press reports, when appearing on Arab radio stations they have been inciters of terrorism and religious hatred between Muslims and Christians.

A nation of twelve million traumatized people, the survivors and the children of survivors of one of the past century’s most horrifying episodes of mass murder.

Four Algerian conscripts are among the soldiers under the command of a young French Army officer, who treats them with respect and trusts them. The other French soldiers refer to them by slang names for Arabs.

Human rights court orders Russia to pay for torture.

A beautiful and young woman says that she is considering running for president of the nation, unleashing an onslaught of attacks and ridicule not only from her old enemies, or from the conservative, sexist sectors of society, but, more surprisingly, from her own husband, her family, and her friends.

A holy war is proclaimed and all people from a certain ethnic background, without distinction of sex or age, are massacred and mutilated, the children are thrown to the dogs and the few survivors are forced to embrace the official religion.

A journalist scrutinizes the methods of the politicians in power to "out" communists and their sympathizers.

Tanks enter a city to extinguish a revolution. Citizens fight the tanks with stones, and then one soldier comes out of one of the tanks, crying: Why do you throw stones at us? Don’t you realize we are here because we love you?

A man no one has ever been able to photograph, the man without a face, until one day in 1973 someone manages to take his picture during holidays in the Caspian Sea. He turns out to be a very good-looking man, but is he the same man who has been in all these places through his life?

A secret agent who never dies, and serves successively the interests of the Napoleonic empire, the Russian Tsar, the Bolshevik revolution and the KGB.

A tyrant, a dictator, a modern-day Hitler, whose favourite colour is pink.