Locusts

Africa's worst locust plague in 30 years is almost over, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Thursday. An FAO statement said the population of desert locusts that ravaged crops in North and Central Africa last year has been virtually wiped out by pesticide spraying and lack of rain. Millions of locusts also perished in an unprecedented flight over the Atlantic last October. Only Niger and Mali have been infested in the last 10 days and only small numbers of locusts persist in West and North Africa.

  As the sun set over Angkor Wat, the temple built for King Suryavarman II in the 12th century, I nosed my Vespa out into the line of three-wheeled tuktuks, bikes and cars. In my pink crash helmet and Gucci bike goggles, I felt as frivolous as an extra in the '60s movie "Quadrophenia," but my mission was a serious one: I was planning to travel the nearly 200 miles from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh in three days, stopping on the way to sample some of the weirdest and most wonderful foods Cambodia has to offer.

Desert locusts are normally solitary individuals who eke out a meager subsistence while avoiding others of their species. But when food sources become abundant, such as after a rain, they transform into ravening packs of billions of insects that can strip a landscape bare. The key to the transformation, researchers said Friday, is the brain chemical serotonin, the chemical that in humans modulates anger, aggression, mood, appetite, sexuality and a host of other behaviors.

When we read about the Arabic world today, we see it most often through the prism of headlines, which wash out complexity as bright light washes color from a photograph. On those rare occasions, then, when a vital novel about the lives of Arabic families is published in English, we may not know what to do with it -- and leave it lying on the shelf. One hopes "The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story" will avoid this fate. Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh's fictionalized account of her mother's life burns with truth on so many levels, it would be sad indeed if this book did not make its way into many, many handbags.

Swarms of locusts, swept mainly from Sudan by high winds, have reached Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, the English-language Arab News reported Thursday.

Iran has formed a task force to combat an expected invasion of crop-devouring locusts from central Africa, the Islamic Republic News Agency said Saturday. Locusts started swarming into the Arabian peninsula in October in what experts have called the worst such invasion in nearly 30 years.

Locusts have invaded southern Jordan, and the government said Thursday that it is taking steps to combat them, including using pesticides. An Agriculture Ministry official said one swarm covered four square miles along the border with Saudi Arabia.

It was with great glee that I read Al Martinez's article about Rob Scribner, the fundamentalist pretender to the 27th Congressional District seat. As a former wanderer in the twilight zone of born-again Christian fundamentalism, I have become more than a little fed up as Scribner and his fellow would-be theocrats have descended on the land like a plague of locusts since their conquest of the White House in 1980. I have been trying to ride out this eight-year reenactment of the Dark Ages as best I can, like one would a bad case of pneumonia.

Millions of locusts swarmed through southern Israel, devouring crops and flowers in the first such invasion since 1959. Residents of Eilat, on the Red Sea, reported clouds of locusts, some as long as 4 inches, eating palm trees bare and wiping out entire gardens. Some Israelis as well as laborers from Thailand, where locusts are a delicacy, made the best of the outbreak by collecting the insects and taking them home for dinner.

Russia has declared a state of emergency in at least 10 regions where locusts are swarming through farmlands, devouring crops, Russian television reported. Locusts have been blamed for destroying tens of millions of acres of farmland in those areas over the last decade. The report did not say how much land had been affected by the latest swarms but did say huge areas of the eastern Siberian regions of Buryatia and Irkutsk had been ruined and the problem was expected to spread.

Desert locusts are normally solitary individuals who eke out a meager subsistence while avoiding others of their species. But when food sources become abundant, such as after a rain, they transform into ravening packs of billions of insects that can strip a landscape bare. The key to the transformation, researchers said Friday, is the brain chemical serotonin, the chemical that in humans modulates anger, aggression, mood, appetite, sexuality and a host of other behaviors.

A maroon-striped marauder with venomous spikes is rapidly multiplying in the Caribbean's warm waters, swallowing native species, stinging divers and wreaking havoc on an ecologically delicate region. The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere -- from the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola to Little Cayman's pristine Bloody Bay Wall.

believed her. I do have photographic evidence. More important, I have the memory of a unique experience that reminded me how colorful, diverse and, yes, educational street market foods are. Eating scorpions, say, exposes the adventurous traveler to a new taste and demonstrates that all food aesthetics are relative; it also reflects the historic fact that billions of humans have had to consume whatever's available. I began this adventure as a boy in Mexico.

IN "Clean and Sober," Glenn Gordon Caron's 1988 rehab drama, Morgan Freeman plays a drug counselor who returns to his office to find Michael Keaton's high-strung coke addict on his phone. "You want to hang up the phone, please?" he says in his sonorous baritone. When Keaton ignores him, he calmly unplugs the phone. "You know what the addict's least favorite word is?" he asks. " 'No.' Ask me if you can use my phone." "May I use your phone?" Keaton says, dripping with sarcasm.

Today's protest music ain't pretty. Talk about "If I Had a Hammer." Hammers and bells abound, bro, but not too many songs to sing. From the first blast, even if the words weren't clear, the danger and warning were right in your face as two bands from San Diego's thriving extreme music/metal scene -- the Locust and Cattle Decapitation -- machined Hollywood's Knitting Factory on Wednesday night along with Rhode Island's Daughters.

The rainy season brings a breathtaking verdant beauty to Sakina Idi's village in southern Niger, but it also fills her heart with a cold dread. Last year, one of her children, a 2-year-old girl, died in the wet season. The year before, another child died. The year before that, two of her children died during the rains, a month apart.

A radio station in Senegal is offering listeners a 110-pound sack of rice if they can catch and kill as many pounds of locusts. "We launched this idea to get more people involved in the war on locusts," said Abdoulaye Ba, a business manager at Sud-FM in St. Louis, capital of one of Senegal's worst affected regions. The plague is destroying vast swaths of crops in West Africa, where many people are subsistence farmers and authorities lack the means to spray pesticide quickly enough.

Swarms of locusts have attacked rice and other crops in northern Dagestan, threatening harvests and winter pastures for more than 1.5 million sheep, Russian regional officials said. The first insects appeared in three districts June 9 and have covered about 44 square miles, the Dagestani Emergency Committee said.

Niger appealed for emergency food aid to help millions of people facing severe shortages in the poor West African nation after a drought and locust infestation. "In these difficult, and to be honest, tragic moments ... I want to launch ... an anguished appeal to the international community for emergency food aid," Prime Minister Hama Amadou told the parliament. About 3.6 million people in Niger are in critical need of food aid, the United Nations says.

Millions of locusts swarmed through southern Israel, devouring crops and flowers in the first such invasion since 1959. Residents of Eilat, on the Red Sea, reported clouds of locusts, some as long as 4 inches, eating palm trees bare and wiping out entire gardens. Some Israelis as well as laborers from Thailand, where locusts are a delicacy, made the best of the outbreak by collecting the insects and taking them home for dinner.