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Humankind doesn't have a great track record when it comes to cleaning up environmental messes, but there was one time we really outdid ourselves. That was back in 1989, when over 190 nations signed the Montreal Protocol, phasing out the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The decade before, scientists had discovered that CFCs were blowing a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, exposing us to dangerous ultraviolet radiation and boosting the risk of skin cancer. Today, CFCs are no longer in widespread use, and the ozone layer appears to be on the mend...
...agricultural fertilizer and a number of other industrial processes - is now the biggest ozone-depleting gas in the air, and could present a real threat to the ozone layer in coming decades. And worse, unlike CFCs, N2O - which also adds to global warming - is not regulated by the Montreal Protocol, meaning there is no global effort to try to reduce emissions. (See pictures of the world's most polluted places...
...news isn't all bad: the fact that scientists can now turn so much of their attention to the dangers of N2O is in part because CFC levels have dropped so low, thanks to the Montreal Protocol. But N2O is likely to prove much more difficult than CFCs to phase out. While CFCs had a relatively narrow range of uses - and chemical companies like DuPont were able to come up with replacements quickly - N2O is all around us, tied intimately to our industrial way of life. The millions of tons of soil fertilizer used in U.S. agriculture alone...
...There are plenty of Asian voices that might otherwise remain unheard. "Without the ALR it would be impossible, unless you had a really a deep interest in a certain country, to read many of these authors," says Montreal-based Filipino author Miguel Syjuco, who had never been published internationally until his short story "Leaves in the Rain: Redux" first came to light in an ALR issue. (His unpublished novel Ilustrado won the Man Asian Literary Prize last year.) "It's opened up a channel," he says. "It's like the Panama Canal...
...year study followed 779 low-income youth in Montreal with annual interviews from age 10 to age 17, then tracked their arrest records in adulthood. Researchers also interviewed the teenagers' parents, schoolmates and teachers. The study accounted for variables such as family income, single-parent-home status and earlier behavior problems (such as hyperactivity) that are known to affect delinquency risk. (See pictures of crime in Middle America...