United Kingdom
Sam Masters is a former deputy foreign editor of The Independent and has reported on current affairs around the world.
Jim Mitchell paddles among the alligators on Florida's Myakka River to relax. "I like the wilderness a lot," he told one interviewer. "They're more scared of me than I am of them." More than a decade has passed since Dr James Mitchell, together with Dr Bruce Jessen, began a programme of "enhanced" interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda militants that this week drew international condemnation.
Territories once enjoyed by the "Islamic State", and brutally enforced public support are, perhaps for the first time, under serious threat. Amid defections from fighters, often unpaid because of air strikes on oil supply lines and a sclerotic economy, the caliphate appears weaker than ever.
Spray painted in blue, eight letters and numbers are all that indicate K60-1-1009, a vast pile of concrete and twisted steel, was once a six-storey home. There, some 32 members of one family lived in what they thought was heaven.
The sandy lane is lined with olive groves where cows lie in the shade. It is, by Gazan standards, idyllic; yet still Anwar al-Zawaraa, 22, wanted to leave. Some three miles away, at a perceived weak point in the border between Israel and Gaza, he made his break for freedom.
Frank Habineza, leader of the sole party opposing President Paul Kagame's attempt to extend his grip on power in Rwanda, had good reason to be cautious. When his Democratic Green Party attempted, and failed, to enter presidential elections five years ago, Mr Habineza's deputy, André Kagwa Rwisereka, went missing.
We're the most unlikely of spies, us. The wind is biting, the March sky clear and, standing next to a ploughed field in Norfolk, we have mud on our shoes. A few more cars arrive along a bumpy track. Conversation between the men who have come here is kept to a minimum.
Above Rue Nicolas Appert, a group of men and women watched two gunmen walking freely in the street below. From the roof the group - reporters and editors who had fled their office at No 10 - filmed as the gunmen slipped away from police after killing 10 journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Salah Abdeslam was a ghost, a jihadist whose presence in Europe was, four months after the Paris attacks, subject to considerable doubt. He could not remain un-found, surely, with an entire continent singularly focused on capturing the man who slicked the Paris pavements in blood? He could, it seemed.
By the time Waad was 15, she had already been tortured for daring to openly discuss Sudan's future. Her parents, both activists, had been "disappeared" after handing out leaflets in the eastern city of Kassala. After that, she says, authorities came for her.
Aicha Elbasri thought the war was over. The conflict in Darfur was no more; now the process of rebuilding lives and relocating the millions of displaced could begin. The person responsible for what some now call the largest single leak in United Nations history continues to realise she was very wrong.
War had returned to Tabit in north Darfur. But once the soldiers had departed there were no bodies to bury. It was unarmed men, women and children that were targeted after a busy market day in the village. The men were led away: many were said to have been badly beaten.
Don't just call it a cheese. For the people of Turkish northern Cyprus, it is an economic lifeline and a source of national pride. Grated in pasta, grilled with eggs for breakfast or raw with watermelon, hellim - or halloumi - is a national concern.
A major nuclear incident was narrowly averted at the heart of Britain's Royal Navy submarine fleet, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. The failure of both the primary and secondary power sources of coolant for nuclear reactors at the Devonport dockyard in Plymouth on 29 July last year followed warnings in previous years of just such a situation.
For William Boot, that innocent fettler of plants thrust into war reporting, the Hotel Liberty provided some small sanctuary in Ishmaelia. "We think it a very promising little war," explains Daily Beast owner Lord Copper at the beginning of Evelyn Waugh's treatise on the perils of foreign reporting, Scoop.
During a brief halt to the bloody battle for the Afghan town of Sangin, the Taliban appeared confident that its advantage was insurmountable, even if British boots were again on the ground in Helmand province. Blaring out through loudspeakers in the besieged town came a single word: "Surrender."
On the second floor of the Haji Laal Jaan hospital a small group of Afghan soldiers awaited their fate. The Taliban were approaching and were now on the floor below them, they frantically told their commanders.
Increasingly pugnacious, Jacob Zuma wanted there to be no doubt. "I appoint the ministers here," he declared, attempting to address claims that the South African state has effectively been captured by Indian billionaires. Shortly after, the chamber of the National Assembly emptied.
After a decade in death's waiting room, Shafqat Hussain was finally released. Outside the gates of Karachi's prison his brothers waited for the body. As a 14-year-old, Mr Hussain, who dropped out of school the year before barely able to read and write, confessed to a crime that he maintained he did not commit.