"Death shall come to whomsoever disturbs the peace of the king". Ill omen or pure mystification? This inscription over the tomb of Tutankhamen should have been taken more seriously by the archaeologists who raised the Pharaoh's sarcophagus.

The members of Howard Carter's team came down with a strange disease, one after the other. Belief in "the curse of the mummy" reached a climax when Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored the dig, died of poisoning five months after the discovery of the tomb.

For the Ancient Egyptians, reverence for the dead was of great importance. Mummified bodies were placed in tombs alongside all the essentials for the afterlife. To protect the tombs and prevent robbers from desecrating them, they were built in isolated and secret places, and a curse was invoked against would-be profaners.

Now that a German scientist has found a rational explanation for these mysterious deaths, we re-examine the circumstances surrounding this magnificent discovery in order to shed new light on one of the 20th century's most enduring myths.

On November 23rd, 1963, in front of a crowd of some one hundred people and the cameras covering his presidential campaign, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was scythed down by a bullet to the head.

After a somewhat hasty enquiry, the Warren commission concluded that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman: Lee Harvey Oswald. And yet - an amateur film totally discredited this hurried finding by proving that JFK was shot from head-on, and not from behind, as the FBI maintained.

Today it remains impossible to pinpoint the guilty party. Buffeted between the official version and the wildest conspiracy theories, public opinion continues to denounce the hypocrisy and manipulation of the FBI, and refuses to rule out a government-wide machination.

As we wait for the official files to be made public in 2023, we take a closer look at the competing theories that shroud the Kennedy enigma.

Jehovah's Witnesses, Children of God, Scientologists... religious, esoteric, cosmic, healing sects... what dangers lurk behind these secret organisations?

In the Age of the Internet, the threat from sects has spread even wider, infiltrating every information network in search of potential targets. As new forms of spirituality and new philosophical trends abound, are we looking at a deliberate strategy on the part of certain sects? Should such groups be allowed to form while the authorities look on impassively, in the name of freedom of thought and religion?

Former believers describe life in the sects, while theologians and other specialists unpick their founding texts and demonstrate how the gurus manipulate their followers to alienate them from society.