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

Werner Herzog has spent six decades making films about people who chase impossible goals in places that don't want them there: a man dragging a steamship over a mountain, conquistadors floating to their deaths on a raft in the Amazon, scientists holed up at the bottom of the world. Long before any of that, he was living the same story himself. Between finishing school and shooting his first real film, Herzog followed a girlfriend to a slum in Manchester, tried to walk into th

For 57 years, a woman audiences knew as Mabel Stark walked into steel cages packed with tigers, wrestled her favourite among them to the ground in front of paying crowds, and survived at least 18 separate maulings along the way. She's usually remembered as the first woman to make a career out of training tigers, in an era when most circuses wouldn't let a woman near the cats at all. Her real name wasn't even Mabel Stark. A Rough Start in Kentucky She was born Mary Ann Haynie