Ozone treaty ‘must tackle CFC smuggling’

Stratospheric Ozone in the Post-CFC Era

Vertical and latitudinal changes in the stratospheric ozone in the post-chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) era are investigated using simulations of the recent past and the 21st century with a coupled chemistry-climate model. Model results reveal that, in the 2060s when the stratospheric halogen loading is projected to return to its 1980 values, the extratropical column ozone is significantly higher than...

Tobacco Smuggling

Smuggling Taxol into cancer cells

Some cancer cells evade chemotherapy by expressing cell membrane pumps to expel toxins. One such pump is the P-glycoprotein, which exports the widely used chemotherapy compound Taxol as it passes through the membrane. To counter P-glycoprotein efflux, Elena Dubikovskaya et al. modified Taxol’s structure, attaching a peptide that alters the mechanism by which the compound enters cells. The new c...

Models for nuclear smuggling interdiction

We describe two stochastic network interdiction models for thwarting nuclear smuggling. In the first model, the smuggler travels through a transportation network on a path that maximizes the probability of evading detection, and the interdictor installs radiation sensors to minimize that evasion probability. The problem is stochastic because the smuggler’s origin-destination pair is known only ...

Vietnam: smuggling adds value.

Internal British American Tobacco (BAT) documents 1 have been explicit about the knowledge of cigarette smuggling into Vietnam. In one document , Vietnam Status Report (12 May 1995), it was stated: " Cigarette imports were banned 6 years ago. Smuggled sales into Vietnam are currently estimated at approximately 7 bn [bil-lion] p.a. although prior to a crack-down in 1990 (when all smuggling was v...