Segregation

THE hem of my heavy Islamic cloak trailed over floors that glistened like ice. I walked faster, my eyes fixed on a familiar, green icon. I hadn't seen a Starbucks in months, but there it was, tucked into a corner of a fancy shopping mall in the Saudi capital. After all those bitter little cups of sludgy Arabic coffee, here at last was an improbable snippet of home -- caffeinated, comforting, American. I wandered into the shop, filling my lungs with the rich wafts of coffee.

Percy Sonn, 57, the president of the International Cricket Council who was instrumental in fighting racial segregation in the sport, died Sunday at a hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, from complications after colon surgery. Sonn, a lawyer who became president of cricket's world governing body in 2006, helped guide his native South Africa back into the international fold after years of isolation because of apartheid. Born Sept.

Fifty years ago, nine black students faced down a mob to integrate Little Rock Central High School. Now, they are being honored on a commemorative silver coin. The U.S. Mint introduced the coin Saturday at the NAACP's Daisy Bates Education Summit, which pays tribute to the Arkansas NAACP leader who served as advisor to the Little Rock Nine. One side of the $1 coin depicts a group of students being escorted by a soldier. It features the phrase "Desegregation in Education" and contains nine stars.

Six members of the Freedom Riders, a group of college students who defied segregation on interstate buses in 1961, got back on the bus to retrace their journey from Montgomery to Birmingham. They were joined by about 100 students on a trip organized by Vanderbilt University. The Freedom Riders started as a group of 15 volunteers but swelled to a movement of more than 400 during their protests in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to pay $2.8 million to a former jail inmate who was severely beaten after other inmates learned he was an accused child molester -- the most the county has paid to resolve a lawsuit involving a jail attack. Attorneys for Jose Beas, 41, had contended that sheriff's employees endangered the married father of three by placing him in a dormitory with 80 general population inmates instead of isolating him as department policy required.

A federal judge in Montgomery has ended a 25-year-old desegregation case against the state, ruling that vestiges of racial disparities in the higher education system have been eliminated. U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy approved agreements settling the case, which has so far generated $210 million in state funds for desegregation.

The Supreme Court justices, hearing arguments on school integration, signaled Monday that they are likely to bar the use of race when assigning students to public schools. Such a ruling could deal a blow to hundreds of school systems across the nation that use racial guidelines to maintain a semblance of classroom integration in cities where neighborhoods are divided along racial lines.

For the first time in a decade, the Supreme Court will revisit the legacy of a landmark: the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 that declared unconstitutional the racial segregation of public schools. Separate schools for black and white children are "inherently unequal," Chief Justice Earl Warren said in an opinion that helped launch the civil rights movement.

Orange County jails are the only ones among the state's five largest jail systems that do not automatically provide protective custody to inmates accused of sex crimes involving children, leaving them vulnerable to attacks like the one last month in which a prisoner was beaten to death. A second inmate, awaiting trial on charges of child molestation, was severely beaten in June and has just recently been released -- brain-damaged, according to his family -- after five months in a hospital.

Benny Andrews, a painter and teacher whose work drew on memories of his childhood in the segregated South, died Friday of cancer at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., his wife, Nene Humphrey, said. He was 75. Andrews painted socially conscious works that addressed issues such as the civil rights movement, the Holocaust and the forced relocation of Native Americans.