Word: moth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...acres of the state of Washington last week in an emergency campaign to repel an airborne assault launched from across the Bering Sea. No, the ex-Soviet Union had not reconstituted itself and invaded. Instead the object of the search-and-destroy spraying mission was the Asian gypsy moth, which in its caterpillar stage is notorious for devouring the leaves of perhaps 600 varieties of trees and shrubs...
...least 35 of the pests entered the U.S. and British Columbia last fall, apparently as hitchhikers aboard a group of Russian freighters. The newly hatched caterpillars climbed up to the highest point on the ship, and were eventually blown to shore. Considered far more destructive than the European gypsy moth, which annually defoliates 4 million acres in the American Northeast, the Asian gypsy moth has decimated millions of acres in Siberia and China. Among the reasons: the Asian moths can cover 20 miles before laying their eggs. (Females of the European variety do not fly.) If the Asian gypsy moth...
...Like a moth to a flame, O'Rourke, 43, is drawn to exotic hellholes, from the Philippines to Orlando's Epcot Center, to find out just what makes the world such a horrible place. (Besides, it's usually great fun.) But it is not his war reporting that distinguishes him; rather, it is his eye for the bizarre, the mundane and the incomprehensible. During student riots in Seoul, while being pelted with roof tiles, O'Rourke took note of the spotless bathrooms. At Saudi gas stations, which have 58 cents-a-gallon gas and American-style rest rooms, he reported...
...pencil-thin laser beam at his target and push a button. A stabilizing computer keeps the beam locked in place, freeing the pilot to pitch and roll as necessary to evade enemy fire while the bomb rides along the beam's reflection, flying into the target like a moth to a flame...
Silber has toned down his rhetoric since then, but he remains as addicted to controversy as a moth is to a porch light. Last month he suggested that funds for teenage welfare mothers who have more than one child be cut off. He enraged the party establishment by comparing the 15% convention threshold to the exclusionary tactics Southern white supremacists used to keep blacks out of politics...