Shortly before midnight on 15 August 1953, an Iranian colonel named Nematollah Nassiri climbed into a car in Tehran carrying a piece of paper that was supposed to end a war fought entirely with money, radio broadcasts and rented crowds. The paper was a royal decree, signed by the Shah, dismissing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Nassiri never got to deliver it. Mossadegh's people were waiting for him, and by morning he was under arrest rather than the man doing the arrestin

Los Angeles County's Department of Children and Family Services oversees roughly six hundred children with the most severe medical needs in its entire system. When one of those children is expected to die soon and needs somewhere to spend their final weeks or months, staff there say there's only one name they think to call. For more than three decades, Mohamed Bzeek has been the only foster parent in the county willing to take children other homes won't. He's cared for more t

Most retellings of Elvis Presley's funeral stop at the hearse pulling out of Graceland's gates on 18 August 1977. That's usually where the story ends: eighty thousand mourners lining Elvis Presley Boulevard, a white suit, a Cadillac procession, a nation stopped in its tracks. What most of them leave out is that Elvis didn't stay buried where he was buried. Nine days after the funeral, three men tried to steal his body out of its tomb, and the break-in that followed changed wh