If you've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, you're going to hear about Apophis, because you're keyed in to all the doomsday networks anyway.

Nevertheless, the doomsday scenarios predicting anarchy and chaos in the post Saleh era are most likely exaggerated. Unlike in Egypt, the vacuum resulting from Saleh s departure can be quickly filled, so the country need not fall back on a military oligarchy.

Trapped in their contradictions and zero sum national dreams, Israelis and Palestinians cannot expect a perfect solution. Their task is to embrace the least imperfect solution before they decline into Doomsday scenarios, such as a hostile Israeli unilateral disengagement, or a one state reality of unending conflict.

As a result of widespread reliance on the precautionary principle, doomsday scenarios have come to dominate discussion of climate change. It is easy to imagine disasters so severe that drastic action to prevent them would be reasonable, and advocates of drastic action can easily scare the public with imagined disasters.

Engaging political Islam will need to be the central part of any successful strategy for the Middle East. Instead of sticking to doomsday prophecies or to categorical perspectives that prevent an understanding of the complex fabric of Islamic movements, the West needs to keep the pressure on the incumbent regimes to stop circumventing political reform.

Collapsing emerging market currencies, and the resulting trade pressures, will make it all the more difficult for them to prevent their unemployment levels from rising significantly. In the absence of a backstop for emerging country finances, the doomsday scenario of a protectionist vicious cycle reminiscent of the 1930 s could no longer be ruled out.

NEW YORK A rare, deadly, and highly contagious disease is spreading across the United States, having infected more than 100 people since the beginning of the year, with thousands more at risk. This is not the doomsday Ebola scenario that so many were envisioning when the first case in the US was diagnosed five months ago.

Obama s foreign policy agenda has been no less audacious than his domestic undertakings. After eight years of American unilateralism that left behind a broken transatlantic alliance, resuscitated the specter of a cold war with Russia, and saw the Middle East decline into a doomsday politics, Obama s injection of new thinking to endemic problems is extremely welcome.

And it lay precisely in that insatiable curiosity, that irrepressible desire to know, no matter what the subject, no matter what the cost, even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock are willing to bet even money that the human race won't be around to imagine anything in the year 2100, a scant 93 years from now.

The international community s failure to bring the CTBT into force is one of the reasons why the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists iconic Doomsday Clock remains poised at five minutes to midnight the closest it has been to midnight since the height of the Cold War. But, while there clearly is cause for concern, there is no reason to lose hope.

But it proved significantly less compelling than the economic doomsday scenarios advanced by its unionist opponents, including former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. In other words, many people s votes were driven by risk aversion, fear, and intimidation, rather than hope, passion, or deep emotional attachment to a common identity.

On one side is the danger that today s alarmism will prove self fulfilling that trade officials and investors will turn the doomsday scenario into reality by panicking. On the other side is the danger that a completed development round will fail to live up to the high expectations that it has spawned, further eroding the legitimacy of global trade rules over the longer run.

Those who live on usury will not rise (on Doomsday) but like a man possessed of the devil and demented. This because they say that trading is like usury. But trade has been sanctioned and usury forbidden by God. Those who are warned by their Lord and desist will keep (what they have taken of interest) already, and the matter will rest with God. But those who revert to it again are the residents of Hell where they will abide for ever.

Those who live on usury will not rise (on Doomsday) but like a man possessed of the devil and demented. This because they say that trading is like usury. But trade has been sanctioned and usury forbidden by God. Those who are warned by their Lord and desist will keep (what they have taken of interest) already, and the matter will rest with God. But those who revert to it again are the residents of Hell where they will abide for ever.