◼ Fears that the end of the world is nigh have spread across the world with only days until the end of the Mayan calendar, with doomsday-mongers predicting a cataclysmic end to the history of Earth. - Nick Allen, Los Angeles, Malcolm Moore in Beijing and Tom Parfitt in Moscow/Telegraph.uk ◼ Via Drudge
Ahead of December 21, which marks the conclusion of the 5,125-year "Long Count" Mayan calendar, panic buying of candles and essentials has been reported in China and Russia, along with an explosion in sales of survival shelters in America. In France believers were preparing to converge on a mountain where they believe aliens will rescue them.
The precise manner of Armageddon remains vague, ranging from a catastrophic celestial collision between Earth and the mythical planet Nibiru, also known as Planet X, a disastrous crash with a comet, or the annihilation of civilisation by a giant solar storm.
In America Ron Hubbard, a manufacturer of hi-tech underground survival shelters, has seen his business explode.
"We've gone from one a month to one a day," he said. "I don't have an opinion on the Mayan calendar but, when astrophysicists come to me, buy my shelters and tell me to be prepared for solar flares, radiation, EMPs (electromagnetic pulses) ... I'm going underground on the 19th and coming out on the 23rd. It's just in case anybody's right."
◼ Russians stockpile... - Tom Parfitt, Moscow/Telegraph.uk
The impending sense of doom spurred a group of MPs in Russia's lower house of parliament to write to the heads of federal television channels this week asking them not to disseminate "pseudoscientific information about the end of the world".
In an editorial on Friday, the Moscow broadsheet Vedomosti said the atmosphere of unease reflected something deep in the Russian character. "Your average American will run for salt and matches only under the real threat of a storm or tornado, announced by the authorities for the next day.
"Our Russian psychosis has two curious features. Firstly, that an 80 per cent Christian Orthodox society for some reason reacts to a Mayan calendar which no one has even seen. And secondly, that the end of the world is perceived as an economic crisis that can be survived on the banal level of consumption."
◼ Doomsayers await the end of world... - Tim Walker/Independent
