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THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 

Hundreds Killed in Hajj Stampede (2006)
About one in four people in the world is Muslim, a demographic that includes more than a billion people. Each Muslim is required to visit Mecca, the Saudi Arabian city of Mohammed's birth, at least once in their lifetime. During the annual pilgrimage, or Hajj, Mecca bears an influx of millions of people. In 2006, during the final day of the requisite Stoning of the Devil ritual, some 350 people were crushed to death in the crowd.

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 

Survivor of British Retreat from Kabul Reaches Jalalabad (1842)
During the First Anglo-Afghan War, a group of 4,500 British soldiers and 12,000 British civilians left Kabul for Jalalabad. Beset by murderous bands, their numbers quickly dwindled. A few were captured alive and later released, but army surgeon William Brydon was the sole person to escape the final ambush by Afghan tribesman and reach the British camp at Jalalabad that day. Part of Brydon's skull had been sheared off by a sword,

similar to native Americans

That's really cool.  I either never knew, or don't remember, that a probe had successfully landed on Titan.

Except that very few native populations successfully defended against colonialism. The Maori sort of did in New Zealand--better than most--and, I suspect there is a good argument that the Afghans did, too. Not sure that was a good outcome for Afghanistan moving forward into the modern age.

This ties into something you said here:

some of the results of colonialism were, no doubt, positive.

If you look at this list of countries by GDP Per Capita, all of the following former British colonies are wealthier than the UK today:

• Bermuda
• United States
• Cayman Islands
• Hong Kong
• Malta
• Australia
• Canada

A lot depends on what empire colonized a given area.  The British set up functional governments and economic systems and left places such as the above in pretty good shape.  That wasn't true of all empires, obviously.  Former Spanish and French colonies are not nearly so well off today.  

Also, while there are many successful former British colonies, the average GDP for former British colonies is lower than the worldwide average, so it's more complicated than did the Brits colonize them. I'm sure it would be impossible to dive into this without a lot of time, and the willingness to take on politics--neither of which are available to me right now, but the difference in modern GDP between countries like Egypt and Jordan on the one hand, and Qatar and Kuwait on the other can probably be explained by oil wealth. But what about Israel, which has a GDP more like the latter, without the oil wealth? Similarly, the differences between Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, and Barbados on the one hand, and Jamaica, Belize, and Guyana (or just a comparison of all of the former British colonies in the Caribbean) would be pretty interesting to see what went right and what went wrong that there is such a difference between them.

You left off Singapore and Hong Kong. :-)

• Hong Kong

I missed Singapore but I did include Hong Kong.