In the past few days, one of the biggest stories of the Pakistan flood crisis has been about donations--or the lack thereof. Indeed, donations from the Western world have been slow in coming so far--much slower than they were for the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, or the Indian...

After weeks of being pushed by right-wing bloggers, the "Obama's Katrina" meme, comparing Deepwater Horizon to the 2005 hurricane, has finally made it all the way to the mainstream, with no less a liberal stalwart than Frank Rich using the phrase in his column title this past Sunday....

In 1755, a massive earthquake struck the city of Lisbon, Portugal, reducing much of the city to rubble and killing close to a third of the city's population. Yet as devastating as it was to Lisbon, the earthquake's effects reached far beyond the city's borders.

For Enlightenment philosophers, the...