Rosa Parks died today in Detroit, at the age of 92. Read more about the seamstress and NAACP secretary from Montgomery, Alabama, who challenged municipal bus laws in 1955, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott–here in Wikipedia. While the mythology holds that Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, in fact she was sitting in the “colored” section of a full bus and refused to give that seat up for a white man. On an odd sidenote, Park’s lawyer sued Outkast in 1999 for using her name in the song Aquemini. Parks’s niece insisted the lawsuit had...

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Is this a particularly disastrous few months, or are the disasters just more noticeable these days? Tens of thousands are dead in the wake of yesterday’s magnitude 7.7 earthquake in South Asia, among them, many hundreds, possibly thousands, of children who were in schools when the quake hit. Among the hardest hit areas is Kashmir, where more than 30,000 are feared dead. In India, there are echoes of Katrina’s aftermath. Reporting for AP, Sadaqat Jon writes: Hundreds of angry villagers blocked roads in the region, protesting the slow pace of rescue efforts. “Everything is destroyed — the ground shook...

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