wednesday reads

It appears that two of the soldiers who helped co-write a riveting New York Times Op-ed last month criticizing U.S. war strategy in Iraq have now died.


Once again an impoverished Texas neighborhood, in this case in the town of Port Arthur, has become the disposal point for hazardous waste, only this time the waste is potentially so lethal that a drop the size of a pinhead can kill.


Who Does U.S. Food Aid Benefit? Current policies favor giant shipping companies and agribusinesses over the starving populations they are supposed to serve.


James Wolcott: If General Petraeus is willing to let Brit Hume lead him around by the damp nose, it's proof that what we have here is little more than Joe Lieberman in highly-decorated drag, positively ablaze with flare. It is a measure of Petraeus's obliging pliancy that he would even accede to testifying on the anniversary of September 11th, thus ensuring that his report would function as a tie-in product.

RJ Eskow asks: Where's Admiral Fallon?

Tom Engelhardt - Imperial Autism: The Petraeus Moment Blots Out the World


The architects of Cambodia’s famed Angkor – the world's most extensive medieval "hydraulic city" – unwittingly engineered its environmental collapse, says research by UNSW scientists and a team of international scholars.


Scientists program a computer that understands knock-knock jokes. (via Techdirt)