to the editor

Cleveland Free Times offers a letter (scroll down) from a reader who vividly describes that city's air: "Black, greasy soot and particles on the windowsills every morning.  Strange stinks coming in the windows every night — acrid enough to wake me from sound sleep."

Pakistan's The Daily Times publishes a heartbreaking letter from a reader concerned about "the sight of boys rummaging through our cities’ garbage heaps .... wasting their youth by picking up garbage rather than school bags.... shadowy figures, living in the twilight zone of life."

Silicon Valley snob laments re-decoration of A-list San Franciscans' see-and-be-seen hang-out. Time marches on all the same.

Responding to a July 12 story, Afghan President Describes Militias as the Top Threat, a former United Nations assistant secretary general and current professor of international affairs at Harvard tells the New York Times that Karzai's complaint documents "another bungled mission by the Bush administration."