World is to end (again) on Saturday – now Russians know it too

The campaign to inform the public about the date of the rapture and the end of time, as predicted by American Christian radio network’s Harold Camping, appears to have come to Russia.

Billboards claiming that on May 21 all true believers will be taken to heaven have appeared in a number of Russian cities, including Moscow, Novosibirsk, Omsk and Krasnoyarsk, reports Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.The Family Radio Network, which promotes Camping’s religious views, broadcasts in many countries, including Russia, although the programming is in English. However, the doomsday billboards are in Russian. It is not clear who paid for the ads.Camping is well-known for his predictions of the date of the second coming, which he calculates through numerology on the basis of Biblical text. His latest expectation has been widely publicized in the United States and many other countries, although it has not received much support from mainstream Christian groups.Earlier, Camping and his followers expected the world to end in September 1994, but the prediction failed to come true. The radio host blamed this on a mathematical error in his calculations.