George M. Houser, organizer of an early Freedom Ride, dies at 99

George M. Houser, a white Methodist minister who helped lead an interracial bus trip across the segregated South in 1947, an act of nonviolent resistance that years later inspired the better known Freedom Rides that stirred the civil rights movement, died Aug. 19 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 99.

Expanding web of scandal in Brazil threatens further upheaval

RIO DE JANEIRO — The charges are nothing less than sweeping: Prosecutors say that Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, took as much as $40 million in bribes for himself and his allies, plundering Petrobras, the government-controlled oil company, while laundering money through an evangelical megachurch.

Louis Stokes, Congressman from Ohio and champion of the poor, dies at 90

Louis Stokes, who as the first African-American congressman from Ohio helped focus federal attention on the nation’s poor and led a special House investigation into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Tuesday at his home in a Cleveland suburb. He was 90.

A year after Ferguson, housing segregation defies tools to erase it

ST. LOUIS — When she tore open the manila envelope on a sweltering morning in early June, Crystal Wade thought she had unlocked her ticket to freedom. “The St. Louis Housing Authority is pleased to inform you,” the letter read, “that you have been determined eligible to participate in our Housing Choice Voucher Program.”