Word: yew
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pacific Coast's forests are teeming with hidden drugs, including the legal kind. Last week the Agriculture Department decided to allow the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb to cut down 38,000 Pacific yew trees for one such substance. The bark of the yew tree is the sole source for a drug called taxol, a promising treatment for breast and ovarian cancer. Despite concerns over the impact of the yew harvest, most environmental groups support the agreement because it specifies that Bristol-Myers will pay for Forest Service research into conservation and management of the yews...
...been 25 years since a tearful Lee Kuan Yew marked the traumatic birth of his island republic by announcing that Singapore had been expelled from the two-year-old Federation of Malaysia. Singapore's 2.7 million citizens are bracing for another wrenching departure this week as Lee, 67, retires. As Lee's successor, 49-year-old Goh Chok Tong, put it, "My greatest challenge is just to maintain standards...
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge law graduate who has run the former British colony since independence in 1965, makes no secret of his distrust of Western media and their influence. In a speech last week, Lee argued that TV news broadcasts, with their dramatic reports on protests in Korea and the Philippines, led to last year's Beijing student massacre. The broadcasts, he alleged, misled China's students into thinking they too could force speedy government change. As for his own government, Lee said, it "can and will insist on no foreign interference in the domestic politics...
Half the compounds are manufactured by chemical and pharmaceutical companies; the rest are provided by botanists and ethnobiologists who collect folk medicines and exotic living materials like the bark of the Pacific yew tree, from which scientists extract Taxol, shown to be effective against ovarian cancer cells. The researchers are looking for "natural" cell killers harvested from such remote locations as the Brazilian rain forest and Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Even ground-up seashells, sponges and coral starfish are studied for chemicals that might show some ability to fight cancer...
Chia, 49, was a member of Parliament representing the opposition Barisan Sosialis (Socialist Front) when he was arrested for allegedly advocating armed struggle against the government of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Over the years, Singapore officials offered to free Chia, who has never been tried, if he would renounce violence. But he refused, maintaining that he had never espoused it in the first place. Last May Chia was sent into a bizarre internal exile on Sentosa, a tiny tourist island just off Singapore's main isle. He is * allowed visitors and free run of the island, where...