Longreads

The inside story of Ranbaxy, a generic drug maker that committed criminal fraud by fabricating data to win FDA approvals:

"Thakur knew the drugs weren't good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world's poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid.

"Ranbaxy executives didn't care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. 'Who cares?' he said, according to Spreen. 'It's just blacks dying.'"

When Jose Rios walked into a Bank of America branch last year, he hoped to open an account for the car repair shop he owned. He didn’t expect to end up with a prison sentence. Days after Rios…

Temp workers from Chicago's Little Village board a bus owned by raitero Rigoberto Aguilar. Some of America's best-known companies and largest temp agencies benefit from — and tacitly…

Few companies have better insight into the impact of austerity on consumers than Asda, the supermarket chain whose heartland is the north of England. Asda is seeing consumer behaviour patterns change…

From the outside, it is hard to know that people live in the Ramada Inn. The parking lot is always empty. The hotel sits facing a wide suburban boulevard called Kipling Street, just off Interstate 70…

On Christmas night, 1997, Crumpy’s Comedy Club in North Memphis hosted a party sponsored by a local barbershop, Magic Clippers. The club had opened that spring, attracting popular black…

NBC News’s Richard Engel was dispatched to cover Syria’s civil war last December when he lived every war correspondent’s nightmare: he and his crew were dragged from their car at…

Hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman has vowed to bring down Herbalife, the 33-year-old nutritional-supplement company, which he views as a pyramid scheme. With his massive shorting of Herbalife stock, the…