Word: ant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lighter than helium and just about as dense, this adventure farce is a pleas ant enough way to pass a little time. Di rector Philippe de Broca (That Man from Rio, Cartouche) has a blithe liking for unlikely situations and hapless heroics...
...fire ants first arrived in Mobile, Ala., in 1918, hidden in a cargo from their native Brazil. Now they infest at least 133 million acres in nine Southern states from Texas to North Carolina and are slowly spreading northward. They live in open areas (farm land, pastures, even lawns) where they build 3-ft-high mounds that hinder mowers, plows and other machinery. They swarm over farm animals or people who stumble over the mounds, stinging them viciously. The ants' venom, which can cause coma in allergic individuals, produces the painful burning sensation that gives the ants their name...
...Butz blamed the Environmental Protection Agency, which had earlier imposed restrictions on the use of Mirex, a powerful anti-ant pesticide. Starting in 1962, the Agriculture Department had sprayed Mirex from airplanes two or three times annually on infested areas. But in 1972 tests showed that when Mirex was washed into estuaries and bays, it killed shellfish. Experiments at the National Cancer Institute also indicated that it might cause cancer in humans. So the EPA cut the permissible number of aerial sprayings to only one a year and in 1973 began investigations-which are still continuing -to determine just...
...deficiencies, Mirex so far is the only practical weapon that has had any effect on the fire ant. Some EPA officials suspect that Butz canceled the program to dramatize what he considers unnecessarily tough EPA restrictions on many different pesticides. At week's end officials of both federal bureaucracies were trying to work out a compromise. They are convinced that they can at least slow the march of the fire ants, which could eventually infest an area extending as far north as southern New Jersey and all the way west to Washington state...
...abortive right-wing coup. The attempt was so inept that some people in Lisbon speculated that the left may have deliberately stirred up violence in hopes of provoking a premature right-wing effort to seize power so that it could be easily crushed. In an ironic twist, former President António de Spínola, the alleged leader of the plot, wound up in exile in Brazil along with former Dictator Marcello Caetano, whose regime he helped topple last year. In an interview in São Paulo with TIME'S Barry Hillenbrand, Spínola said that...