Air quality regulators covering almost 11,000 square miles that are inhabited by almost 17 million people, including residents of Los Angeles, have approved new rules designed to help protect the public from poisons such as arsenic, benzene and heavy metals in industrial emissions.
In Yemen, Iraq, Syria and across the Gulf, the Saudis' age-old proxy war with Iran, formerly Persia, poisons hopes of peace.
The fastest-acting of all the classic poisons, cyanide, had its day, of course, and the last century also saw the emergence of a host of other less familiar but even more deadly toxins, each more fearsome than the next: sarin, anthrax, botulinum.
LegoSuperstar was even able to identify her own speciality: "I'm a poisons expert, if the look on the children's faces at teatime is anything to go by".
In Pakistan, he was instructed in the use of weapons and explosives and the court was shown his "student notebooks" from this time, with his handwritten notes and diagrams on subjects such as Kalashnikovs and the manufacture of poisons and bomb-making.
American factories cause acid rain that poisons Canadian forests; Indian ones pollute the Ganges, ruining rice paddies in Bangladesh.
In turn, that poisons peace efforts between the countries.
Syria is thought to have hundreds of tonnes of mustard gas, sarin and the far more lethal VX, as well as other poisons not banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention signed by nearly all the world's countries.The attack, if verified, is oddly timed, since a UN team of weapons inspectors arrived in Damascus only three days earlier to look into previous allegations of chemical weapons being used.
The dream is to make a uniform for future warriors that could neutralise chemical poisons, treat wounds, or hydrate soldiers in the desert by recycling body fluids.Like a dedicated mobile hospital, these fabrics could monitor combatants' heart rates, keep their bodies nourished, deliver drugs, and relay their condition to headquarters.
People continue to ingest pesticides at moments of crisis, but now the poisons they take are safer and fewer die.
FABRICATING history is an act of intellectual vandalism that poisons modern understanding of past misdeeds and heroism alike.
