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Swedish rock band Europe, best known for their 1987 arena hit "The Final Countdown," are enjoying their biggest chart success ever - thanks to GEICO. Placement in the insurance agency's current "It's What You Do" campaign, where a bunch of office workers wait around as an employee heats up a burrito while the band rocks out in the corner, has vaulted the song to Number 1 on multiple Billboard charts. Last month, Billboard reported that "The Final Countdown" spent four weeks atop its Hard Rock Digital Songs chart, giving the band their first Number 1 in their career. "The Final...

A British woman says she has finally found the true meaning of marriage now that she has divorced her husband and married her dog. Amanda Rodgers and her dog/wife Sheba appeared on British television's ITV's "This Morning" Tuesday to discuss why she decided to wed her pet in a ceremony attended by 200 people in Croatia last week, reports the Mirror. "She was two weeks old and she was new to the world — but I fell in love with her," Rodgers, 47, told the show's hosts. "I knew that we were meant to be." RELATED: BRAZILIAN MAN PLANS TO...

The White House’s budget office has notified federal agencies that the government is shutting down Tuesday, after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a temporary spending plan. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said late Monday in a memorandum to agency heads that there was no indication Congress would approve a short-term funding measure before the midnight deadline. She said federal agencies should execute their plans for an orderly shutdown. The deadline for a shutdown came and went at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, after a lengthy battle between the Republican-controlled U.S. House...

Global average temperature has been flat for a decade. But frightening myths about global warming continue. We're told there are more hurricanes now. We're told that hurricanes are stronger. But the National Hurricane Center says it isn't so. Meteorologist Maria Molina told me it's not surprising that climatologists assumed hurricanes would get worse. "Hurricanes need warm ocean waters," but it turns out that "hurricanes are a lot more complicated than just warm ocean waters." Computer models have long predicted nasty effects from our production of greenhouse gasses. But the nasty effects have not appeared. As far as hurricanes, more hit...

Archbishop prays while topless gay activists shout curses and douse him with water BY JOHN-HENRY WESTEN Wed Apr 24, 2013 16:44 ESTComments ()Tags: Andre-Joseph BRUSSELS, April 23, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In an astonshing display of gentleness in the face of a vile attack, the head of the Catholic Church in Belgium, Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, remained calmly seated with eyes closed in prayer Tuesday as four topless women attacked him with shouts and curses and doused him with water. It’s not the first time the bishop has been attacked for standing up for the Church’s teachings on homosexuality and expressing his...

A Catholic’s Guide to Surviving the End of the World As We Know It By Emily Stimpson Does anyone else feel like one night, not too long ago, they went to bed in a reasonably normal world and woke up to a world scripted by Albert Camus?My hand’s up. Way, way up. I know I’m still supposed to be bubbling over with Easter joy (and believe me, I’m doing my due diligence in the chocolate-eating department), but the culture’s rapid and violent pivot to absurdism has me too disoriented for bubbling. Spinning is more like it.I mean, we’ve got George...

Remember back in 2011 when radio broadcaster and end-of-the-world prognosticator Harold Camping predicted the world’s end on October 21 yet the day passed with nary a sign of Armageddon? Last year, the ancient Mayans and a few North American self-proclaimed prophets like Warren Jeffs had various dates in December pegged for the end. Imagine the surprise of their true believers when the sun came up the next day. Did they feel relief? Disappointment? Skepticism (somewhat overdue) toward their leaders? Some no doubt have left the cult while others wait in trepidation for their prophet to predict a new date of...

George Noory hosts. Tonight's topics: "Apocalipticism" and "End of the Mayan Calendar".

SAN DIEGO - With his gas mask on and machete in hand, Nikko Sanchez is ready for December 21. "It does possibly mean the end of the world," said Sanchez. "I do know about the Mayan calendar, I have done some research." The Mayan calendar only extends to December 21, 2012. Some people interpret that as a prediction for the end of the world on that date. "I've seen how horrific people can be when they really want to be," said Sanchez. Sanchez is a Gulf War veteran and he's ex-law enforcement. Now, he's a "prepper" -- prepared to survive...

Hotel owners around the pyramid-shaped Mount Rtanj, in the east of the Balkan country, say that bookings are flooding in, with believers in the prophecy hoping that its purported mysterious powers will save them from the apocalypse. Adherents of the end-of-the-world scenario think the 5,100ft-high mountain, part of the Carpathian range, conceals a pyramidal building inside, left behind by alien visitors thousands of years ago. Arthur C Clarke, the British science fiction writer, reportedly identified the peak as a place of "special energy" and called it "the navel of the world". Doomsday cultists believe that it emits special energy that...

For those of you who’ve been living under a mainstream media rock the past ten years, then the following sentences are simply the chorus to a song by the famous rock band R.E.M. It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. But to those of us with an apocalyptic bent, the chorus to that song takes the form of an acronym. TEOTWAWKI. And we refer to the acronym on a daily basis, because we...

A massive explosion on the sun's surface has triggered the largest solar radiation storm since 2005, hurling charged particles at Earth. (NASA / May 4, 2012) A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before — and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of...

If you’d really like to depress yourself some evening, watch “Doomsday Preppers” on the National Geographic Channel. The show details the plans of normal, well adjusted people to cope with the aftermath of fiscal collapse, nuclear holocaust, the eruption of Yellowstone, solar flares, and so on. The New York Times noted with outrage that many of these people were accumulating guns and ammunition in order to defend their 1,500 pounds of MREs and dried brown rice, but stockpiling guns is fine with me. My concern is that most of them seem pretty inexpert with guns. One prepper was counting on...

A year from today the world will come to an end, according to some who cite the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar as evidence of a Dec. 21, 2012, apocalypse. But both astronomers and experts on Mesoamerican history say the Mayan apocalypse is likely to be another in a long line of failed doomsdaysAccording to the Maya Long Count calendar, the winter solstice of 2012 — Dec. 21, 2012 —is the end of a b'ak'tun, a 144,000-day cycle that has repeated 12 times since the mythical Maya creation date. The b'ak'tun that will end in 2012 is the...

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain. The major scientific project will follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider and will answer questions about the universe. The laser will be capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it will be similar to the light the earth receives from the sun but focused on a speck smaller than a pin prick. Scientists say it will be so powerful they will be able to boil the very fabric of space and create a vacuum. A vacuum fizzles with...

In case you had forgotten (or made other plans), the world is supposed to end tomorrow. The prognosticator who predicted that the world would end this spring, Harold Camping, has updated his forecast, and the new End Date is October 21. In May, the world was supposed to end with a series of rolling earthquakes that began at 6PM in New Zealand (and then rolled through all the world's time zones). This time, Harold Camping says, the world will end quietly. As far as we know, he hasn't specified a particular time. In the intervening months, unfortunately, Camping has suffered...

Ready or not here she comes. New Yorkers are scrambling for last minute provisions today as Hurricane Irene draws closer to the city. The forceful storm — a Category 1 with ferocious 85 mph winds — is expected to wallop the city by 4 a.m. tomorrow. -snip- "How can I get out of Coney Island?" said Abe Feinstein, 82, from an apartment with view of the boardwalk. "What am I going to do? Run with this walker?"

The Christian radio station belonging to Harold Camping, who twice incorrectly predicted the world would end, plans to replace his weekday segment Open Forum with new programming after rebroadcasting the last show he recorded before suffering a stroke on June 9. Family Radio on Hegenberger Road began playing repeats of Open Forum after a stroke hospitalized the 89-year-old Camping. On Monday, staff again started airing 20 segments recorded by Camping from May 23 -- two days after he most recently predicted Judgment Day would arrive -- through June 9. "When those are completed, we will have other programming that is...

ALAMEDA -- Harold Camping, the Doomsday radio preacher who sparked international media attention by predicting the end of the world last month, has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke at his Alameda home Thursday night. The 89-year-old radio evangelist and president of the Oakland nonprofit Family Radio was taken by ambulance from his house Thursday night, a neighbor said, but his well-known, gravelly voice that led many believers to donate millions of dollars to his cause may never be the same. "He had a stroke, it was on his right side," said the neighbor, who declined to give her name...