Word: doomsday
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...doomsday predictions may have been prematurely shelved. While Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 says Harvard intends to rescind the admission of students who try to break early decision commitments, carrying out that intention may be easier said than done. A number of routes still remain for both students and colleges to move away from early decision this year, and observers are certain the system will not emerge from this admissions season unchanged...
...what if there were 50 cases like this at each school out of an early decision group of 500 or 600? Could Harvard realistically rescind such a substantial proportion of its class at such a late date? If not, the scenario would be no different than the doomsday predictions flying around in June. And after a chaotic year, early decision schools would be forced to abandon their programs. If only a few students attempt to renege, they are likely to suffer. But if enough do, the system would fall apart...
...politics today. The Bush Administration has succeeded in "changing the tone" back to the days of pessimism, when partisan politics pitted businesses against clean air and water. It has turned the environmental agenda over to big polluters, denouncing even modest reforms as technologically impossible and economically ruinous. These doomsday predictions aren't new: if Richard Nixon had believed polluters' grim fairy tales, he never would have put an end to the days when lakes and rivers literally caught fire...
...experience of last fall--the terrorist attacks, the anthrax deaths--not only deepened the interest among Christians fluent in the language of Armageddon and Apocalypse. It broadened it as well, to an audience that had never paid much attention to the predictions of the doomsday prophet Nostradamus, or been worried about an epic battle that marks the end of time, or for that matter, read the Book of Revelation. Since Sept. 11, people from cooler corners of Christianity have begun asking questions about what the Bible has to say about how the world ends, and preachers have answered their questions...
...Some of the groups may be little more than bizarre clubs or innocuous doctrinal offshoots of traditional Buddhism and Shintoism, Japan's most common faiths. But religious scholars and the police are nonetheless alarmed by what they see as the proliferation of doomsday cults. Mystics consumed with signs of the apocalypse have a tendency to bring their visions horrifically to life. Japanese need no reminder of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that staged a deadly chemical gas attack on commuters in Tokyo's subway system seven years ago, allegedly masterminded by Aum's Shoko Asahara. Last week, one of Asahara...