Word: locust
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...Israelis and Egyptians would hesitate to even sit at the same table. In the rambling building overlooking London's Hyde Park, they converse with a frank respect for each other's opinions. There, for a change, they have joined forces to fight a common enemy: the desert locust. In the conference rooms of Britain's Anti-locust Research Center, which works with the United Nations, entomologists and agricultural scientists from 30 nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East gather to mount a defense against the ugly winged brutes known as Shistocerca gregaria...
...will be the sole human survivor of nuclear attack that he builds an ark in his back yard and stocks it with animals. Author Marcus writes of them with a compassion untainted by sentimentality. Like a somewhat similar writer, Hollywood's late Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), he has a quick eye and a sharp ear. Nothing finally happens to his characters; they are merely suspended before the reader for a moment in time, and they disappear into a future no more hopeful than their past. But for a few moments they stand illuminated in the light...
Taylor's tulips were the vanguard of the 1962 class of the periodical cicada-more popularly known as the 17-year locust. Her swarm was the forerunner of a wave called "Brood II," which will soon take over most of the Eastern seaboard from North Carolina to Connecticut. According to Dr. B. A. Porter, entomologist at the Plant Industry Station in Beltsville, Md., the 1962 plague should be in full swing (and cry) by the end of May, should taper off about the first of July...
...There are only three plagues in the world," says an old Arab proverb-"the rat, the locust, and the Kurd." While Arab opinion may be biased, it is true that through the centuries the Kurds have deserved their reputation as troublemakers. Living in the grandly forbidding mountain country that straddles the borders of Iraq. Turkey, Syria, Iran and Russia, they have always been in a state of rebellion against outside discipline. After World War II, Russia happily used the disgruntled Kurds to harass the other "host" countries. Last week the Kurds were at it again, waging war against the Iraqi...
Nonetheless, argues Macleod, "it is not at Munich but at the locust years, 1934 and 1935, that the finger of criticism should be pointed." For despite Chamberlain's "most valiant" championship of rearmament in the mid-'30's, so little was done that by September 1938. Britain was almost completely defenseless against air attack, had only a token quantity of modern antiaircraft guns and one operational Spitfire squadron. "After Munich," says Iain Macleod, "the last strong hopes of peace were not allowed to hold back our accelerating preparations against...