Word: doomsdays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...press conference last week that the coming year would be a tough one for the Russian economy. "What is in store for us," he predicted, "in terms of scale of the problem exceeds what we have faced in the past." Waiting in the wings for just such a doomsday scenario to come to pass are Russia's Communists, who have consoled themselves after defeat in the recent election by predicting that Yeltsin's victory will be short-lived. Come the fall, they say, the government's credibility will be wiped out by an economic collapse, and the continuing decline...
These films were routine but easy to take; they put the fun in perfunctory. ID4 is a big step up, a doomsday fable told at warp speed. The approach of the alien ships is nicely achieved, with ominous shadows creeping across the Apollo 11 monument on the moon, then up the facades of the White House and the Empire State Building. On Earth, an ensemble cast fleshes out the stereotypes (Harvey Fierstein, whiny gay man; Judd Hirsch, crusty old Jew; Vivica Fox, stripper with heart of gold), while the three male leads mine all available righteousness and comic charm. Wryness...
...festival has always had a healthy sense of its mission--still does, as indicated by three billboards promoting the doomsday summer thriller Independence Day. NO WARNING, announces the first sign; NO NEGOTIATIONS, reads the second, which shows an alien spaceship hovering over the Riviera; finally, as the spaceship obliterates all sunlight, the legend says, NO CANNES. You have to admire a festival that can imagine no worse catastrophe than its own disappearance...
...figured clay called bullae, bought from Arab dealers in 1975, had once been used to mark documents. Nahman Avigad of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem identified the impressions stamped into one piece of clay as coming from the seal of Baruch, son of Neriah, a scribe who recorded the doomsday proclamations of the prophet Jeremiah. Another bore the seal of Yerahme'el, son of King Jehoiakim's son, who the Book of Jeremiah says was sent on an unsuccessful mission to arrest both prophet and scribe - again confirming the existence of biblical characters...
Science fiction? The apocalyptic vision of a doomsday cult? No, this disastrous scenario came last week from the sober pages of the journal Science. A team of U.S. and Chinese researchers studying the remains of volcanoes that began erupting 250 million years ago reported that according to radioactive dating, the eruptions coincided in geologic time with one of the great unexplained cataclysms in earth's history--a mass extinction at the end of the Permian period that wiped out up to 95% of all ocean-dwelling species and at least 70% of land-dwelling vertebrates...