密歇根弗林特自來水含鉛量超標

　　2016年1月18日CNN聽力：密歇根弗林特自來水含鉛量超標 香港當局表現將周全制止當地象牙商業

　　You're only a day away from Friday.

　　We're happy to see you take 10 minutes for CNNSTUDENT NEWS.

　　From the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia, I'm CarlAzuz.

　　Our first story takes us to the U.S. state ofMichigan.

　　The National Guard has been activated there.

　　A state of emergency has been declared.

　　It's all related to the water supply in the city of Flint.

　　About 100,000 people live there and some of them have been exposed to increased levels oflead in their tap water.

　　This is serious.

　　Lead poisoning can cause developmental and behavioral problems in children.

　　It can lead to lower IQ levels. It's irreversible.

　　And what started out as a way to save money in the struggling city has put parts of thepopulation at risks.

　　A preliminary investigation did not blame the city council or the mayor of Flint, but it put theblame at the state level, with Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality.

　　This neighborhood says it all, 15 percent of homes in Flint, Michigan are boarded up.

　　There's a 40 percent poverty rate, high unemployment, and it's consistently at the top ofthe nation's list of most dangerous places.

　　This 33 square mile city doesn't even have a grocery store.

　　And now, they don't have clean drinking water.

　　For 18 months, researchers believe the water flowing through taps across Flint has beentainted with lead.

　　In an attempt to cut costs, city officials stopped getting pretreated water from the city ofDetroit in 2014, and instead began using water from the nearby Flint River.

　　The problem is that the Flint River is 19 times more corrosive than Lake Huron, Detroit's watersource, according to researchers at Virginia Tech.

　　And the city wasn't treating it according to federal law.

　　Lead pipes began to corrode, leaking into the water.

　　Dr.Mona Hanna-Attisha is a pedestrian at Flint's Hurley Children's Hospital.

　　It is a well-known potent neurotoxin.

　　There's tons of evidence on what lead does to a child.

　　After hearing her patients complain about water that looked and smelled and tasted funny, shedecided to investigate.

　　Using publicly available data on lead levels in children in Flint, she found that the percentage oflead in cases doubled, even tripled in some places after the water switch.

　　Here's how this happened:

　　the corrosive Flint River water goes from the plant to the water mains to the service lines tohomes.

　　In Flint, the water mains are made of iron, which turns some of the water brown.

　　And half of the service lines and pipes in Flint homes are made of lead.

　　For at least a year, city and state officials denied anything was wrong.

　　The former mayor, Dayne Walling, publicly drank the water to make a statement.

　　But a 2011 study had also warned that the Flint River was corrosive and needed to be treated.

　　In late September, officials finally recognized what experts had been saying, the water in Flintwas toxic.

　　By October, the city reverted back to using the Detroit water supply, but the damage wasdone.

　　I do apologize for it with respect to our role in this issue.

　　The state's director of environmental quality stepped down, and Walling lost a reelectioncampaign that centered around the issue.

　　In retrospect, I regret all of it, all the way back to seeing the city move to a different drinkingwater source.

　　You can't put a dollar amount on the devastation to our community, our kids, and it wascompletely avoidable.

　　The Government of Hong Kong Special Administration Region of China is taking a step towardclamping down on its ivory trade.

　　Buying and selling ivory is currently allowed there, said to be the world's largest market forivory.

　　The valuable material comes from the tusks of elephants.

　　It's durable, attractive, easy to carve.

　　It's been used to make everything from jewelry to figurines, to piano keys, but it's also led tothe decimation of some elephant species by poachers, people who illegally killed the animalsfor their ivory.

　　Wildlife conservationists are applauding an announcement by the Hong Kong City Governmentthat it will ban the legal trade of ivory in this island city.

　　The international trade of ivory was banned in 1989, and despite that, there are more than 400licensed ivory traders in Hong Kong.

　　The dealers insist they're following the rules.

　　They're only buying and selling from a stockpile of ivory from elephants that were killed before1989.

　　But the conservationist group Wild Aid conducted a year-long investigation during which theyalleged that some of these dealers must be laundering ivory that was poached from Africa after1989, ivory that may also be smuggled in and outside of Hong Kong, against international law.

　　Now, the government of Hong Kong says it still needs to draw off legislation for this proposedban.

　　Activists say every minute counts because at the current rate of poaching, the elephant, theliving mammal to walk the earth in the wild could be extinct within a generation.

　　Ivan Watson, CNN, Hong Kong.

　　Well, we always welcome international viewers to the show.

　　And we look for your request at CNNStudentNews.com.

　　Heard from Shape of Belgium on Wednesday's transcript page.

　　SHAPE American Middle School is there. It's great to see you.

　　From Seeley Lake in western Montana, hello to the Blackhawks.

　　Seeley-Swan High School is on the roll.

　　Wrapping things up in Mount Airy, North Carolina.

　　Near the border with Virginia, the Bears are watching from Mount Airy Middle School.

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