I’m pretty sure that when I was a kid at Sunday school we had to make a fake newspaper whose front page trumpeted “Plague of Locusts Afflicts Egypt.” But now that’s a real headline (though it loses something without my epic crayon drawing of the pharaoh). Just three weeks before Passover — the Jewish holiday celebrating the Exodus story, 10 plagues and all — an unusually large and hungry swarm of locusts, the eighth plague, is descending on Egyptian lands.
Egyptian officials didn’t expect the plague to pass by the country’s capital, until Sunday when the locusts unexpectedly arrived in Cairo. The government denied reports that the locusts had started devastating crops as well as a report from United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that the Ministry of Agriculture cleared 11,000 hectares of land in an attempt to save the harvest.
My fake newspaper also had a weather report: “Meteorologists forecast dark days ahead.” As far as we know, there’s not supposed to be an eclipse (aka “plague of darkness”) anytime soon, but if the sun disappears, we recommend finding a lamb to slaughter, stat.
