Political Activism

When Sonia Sotomayor goes before the Senate next month for her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the questioning is likely to focus on her work as a civil rights advocate in the 1980s as much as on her nearly two decades on the federal bench. That is because she was a board member of a Puerto Rican advocacy group that sued to overturn New York City's civil service exams and to win more police and firefighter jobs for Latinos.

Kirsten Brydum pedaled away from the Howlin' Wolf club into the darkness of another American city that she didn't know very well. It was 1:30 a.m. She rode a black cruiser bicycle with a basket on the back, borrowed from friends of friends. In nearly every city she had visited on her 2-month-road trip, it seemed someone was willing to lend her an old bike. The Rebirth Brass Band was on the bill that night. Brydum, 25, had danced for a while outside the club in her flip-flops.

Call it urban warfare for the rich and richer. Mexico City's elite is up in arms over plans to build roadway tunnels and overpasses through lovely suburban neighborhoods, a project that critics say would push the city's destructive sprawl into forests and a vital aquifer when fresh air and water are already scarce. Potential beneficiaries of the project are inhabitants of an even wealthier suburb, not to mention the politician who would get a boost from the high-profile works.

Victoria Vergara possesses a third-grade education and the confident voice of a natural leader. She makes beds and cleans bathrooms for a living but tells her daughters that the U.S.A. is a country "where you can fly if you want to." After listening to her tell her story in her humble home in West Adams, I was inclined to agree. Thanks to the magic of American possibility and her own Latina tenacity, Vergara has escaped the cruel poverty of southern Mexico and reinvented herself as a U.S.

It wasn't the first time Robin Tyler and Diane Olson said "I do," but they hope it will be the last. Holding hands as they stood under a white chuppah, the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in Los Angeles County returned to the Beverly Hills Courthouse on Friday morning and repeated their vows. "I hope this will be the last Valentine's Day we all have to come back here," said Tyler, 66. "But this is not about us anymore. We do not want to be the only ones on the freedom train."

The icons of revolutions past have found rebirth in Tehran. Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi has been cast on Twitter as the "Gandhi of Iran" who speaks of his own martyrdom and, while not naturally an inspiring figure, has led hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets. In criticizing the crackdown in Tehran, President Obama has quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and reminded the Iranian government that "the world is watching."

Conservatives are calling it their August Revolt -- a surprising upsurge of activism against President Obama's proposed healthcare overhaul. Spurred on by the success of their efforts to dominate the news at Democratic town hall meetings, conservative groups are reporting increases in membership lists and are joining forces to plan at least one mass demonstration in Washington next month. But the conservative mobilization has also created an unusual dilemma for Republican leaders, who want to turn the enthusiasm into election victories next year but find themselves the target of ire from many of the same activists.

It is 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday. Along streets of grimy stucco bungalows with bougainvillea, American flags and "Beware of Dog" signs on chain-link fences, a couple of residents are hosing down lawns. It ought to be quiet, but it's not. Behind the garden walls of Astor Avenue, there's a chugging and a hissing and a clanking and a squeaking. Two yellow locomotives, hooked to cars piled high with metal containers, idle on the track of the Union Pacific. Their stacks spew gray plumes of smoke.

It is one of the enduring questions of religion and science, and lately of American politics: When does a fertilized egg become a person? Abortion foes, tired of a profusion of laws that limit but do not abolish abortion, are trying to answer the question in a way that they hope could put an end to legalized abortion. Across the country, they have revived efforts to amend state constitutions to declare that personhood -- and all rights accorded human beings -- begins at conception.

Mike Roselle is in his element -- fighting a controversial coal industry practice called mountaintop removal mining in the town of Rock Creek, W. Va. "I had to bail some people out of jail," the 55-year-old rumbles happily by phone from the office of Climate Ground Zero. "We've been unleashing hippie hell on them." By "them," he means Massey Energy, the coal megalith that controls huge swaths of West Virginia and employs a fair percentage of its residents. Roselle is a stranger there, but after seven months he finds himself in familiar territory.