David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Got Its Way in Mexico. The New York Times, 17 December 2012. (This is Part Two of a two-part series. Part One: Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle.) “Wal-Mart Abroad: A retail giant fueled growth with bribes. Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited…”
Archives for December 2012
December 17, 2012
Operation Delirium: a secret Cold War chemical weapons testing program conducted by the US Army during the 1950s and ’60s
Raffi Khatchadourian, Operation Delirium. The New Yorker, 17 December 2012. “Military doctors who helped conduct the [psychochemical] experiments [during the 1950s and ’60s] have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” Companion piece to Operation Delirium: High Anxiety: LSD in the Cold War by Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 16 December 2012. “For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation [torture] technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium”…documents the people who were involved and what they did.” Primary Sources : Operation Delirium, The New Yorker, 26 December 2012.
December 1, 2012
The Innocent Man, Part Two
Pamela Colloff, The Innocent Man, Part Two. Texas Monthly, December 2012. This is Part Two of a two-part story. Part One was published in November 2012. “During the 25 years that Michael Morton spent wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his wife, he kept three things in mind: someday he would prove his innocence to their son. Someday he would find out who had killed her. And someday he would understand how this had happened to him.”