Word: attacking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Biologists have identified numerous "hot spots" where ecosystems are under attack and large numbers of unique species face an immediate threat of elimination. Among the troubled areas: Madagascar, where more than 90% of the original vegetation has disappeared; the monsoon forests of the Himalayan foothills that are being denuded by villagers in search of firewood, building materials and arable land; New Caledonia, 83% of whose plants occur nowhere else; the eastern slope of the Andes, as well as forests in East Africa, peninsular Malaysia, northeast Australia and along the Atlantic coast of Brazil...
When scientists first warned in the 1970s that CFCs could attack ozone, the U.S. responded by banning their use in spray cans. (Manufacturers switched to such environmentally benign substitutes as butane, the chemical burned in cigarette lighters.) But the rest of the world continued to use CFC-based aerosol cans, and overall CFC production kept growing. The threat became far clearer in 1985, when researchers reported a "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Although the size of the hole varies with the seasons and weather patterns, at times Antarctic ozone has been depleted by as much...
...when alleged supporters of the People's Mujahedin, a dissident Iranian group, were rounded up and hanged in public. Since then, factions vying for control of the regime appear to have increasingly used executions as a political weapon. "Do you think we should greet with sweets those who ((helped attack)) the Islamic Republic?" asked President Seyed Ali Khamene'i in a broadcast earlier this month. "They are condemned to death, and we will execute them...
...from curbing the indiscriminate violence, the patrolling Indian soldiers sometimes add to it. After every attack on the peacekeeping troops -- and there have been 40 published incidents in the past three months around Jaffna alone -- surrounding areas are cordoned off and large numbers of civilians hauled in for brutal interrogation...
...this tragic disease moves much more slowly. It might take a century to disappear." And wars and weapons continually remind him about the fragility of Spaceship Earth. But in the Asimovian view, that fragility is an echo of his personal history. He was felled by a heart attack in 1977 and underwent a triple coronary bypass in 1983. Manners and habits changed overnight. Although he had a great appetite for high-cholesterol foods and no taste for exercise, he bought a machine that demands the efforts of cross-country skiing. Week by week, he worked himself into shape. En route...