Blind psychic predicted 9/11
QUESTION How accurate have the psychic Baba Vanga’s predictions been?
A host of predictions have been attributed to the mystic Baba Vanga by her followers.
they claim she foretold the break-up of the soviet Union, the Chernobyl disaster, the date of stalin’s death, the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk and the 9/11 attacks in the U.s.
Born in present-day Macedonia in 1911, Vangeliya Pandeva Dimitrova was a psychic who lived for most her life in the Bulgarian village of Rupite, near the Greek border.
In her teens, she was caught in a violent storm that threw her into a field. When she was found, she had been blinded, but claimed she had been given the gift of clairvoyance.
It was said she was able to predict the future and communicate with the dead and extra-terrestrial visitors from a planet called Vamfim.
Known as Baba (grandmother) Vanga (diminutive of Vangeliya), many sought her consultation, including prominent Communist officials and their families.
she became world famous in the early seventies when she began receiving visits from Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of todor Zhivkov, the Communist dictator who ruled Bulgaria with an iron fist from 1954 to 1989.
It is uncertain whether Baba Vanga predicted Lyudmila’s mysterious demise in 1981 — many Bulgarians suspect she was murdered by the KGB for organising celebrations of the 1,300th anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state.
Baba Vanga’s other famous encounter was with the Yugoslav singer silvana Armenulic — nicknamed the Queen of sevdalinka — a favourite of Yugoslav president tito.
their chilling meeting took place in 1976 when the singer was on tour in Bulgaria. Vanga stood silently at a window with her back to Armenulic. When the embarrassed singer finally offered to leave and pay, Baba Vanga said: ‘You do not have to pay. I do not want to speak with you. Not now. Go and come back in three months.’
As Armenulic retreated, Vanga said: ‘Wait. In fact, you will not be able to come.
Go, go. If you can come back in three months, do so.’ Armenulic left Vanga’s home in tears.
she died two months later in a car crash with her sister Mirsada.
Usually, Baba Vanga’s predictions were couched in terms that are vague enough to be believable.
It’s claimed she predicted 9/11 with: ‘horror, horror! the American brothers will fall after being attacked by the steel birds. the wolves will be howling in a bush and innocent blood will be gushing.’
other predictions appear to be wrong. For instance, in 1979 she predicted the supremacy of Russia: ‘ Everything will melt away like ice yet the glory of Vladimir, the glory of Russia, are the only things that will remain. Russia will not only survive, it will dominate the world.’
Baba Vanga died on August 11, 1996. It’s uncertain whether she predicted this. A museum in Rupite is dedicated to her.
Isabel Milner, Stone, Staffs.
QUESTION Has an album of poetry ever entered the UK charts?
IN 2011, the Waterboys released An Appointment With Mr Yeats, an album of songs based on the lyrics of Ireland’s favourite poet, W. B. Yeats.
While the idea sounds pretentious, band leader and songwriter Mike scott had proven it could be done with a brilliant rendition of the stolen Child on the 1988 album Fisherman’s Blues.
An Appointment With Mr Yeats set 14 poems to music, mostly arranged by scott, accompanied by his long-time partner, the virtuoso fiddle player steve Wickham, and other band members. the album includes many of Yeats’s most famous poems such as the Lake Isle of Innisfree and An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.
A particular favourite is scott’s version of Mad As the Mist And snow. the band produced a wild performance of it on Later With Jools holland, including a swirling fiddle solo by Wickham that made the other acts in the show, particularly Coldplay, seem positively insipid.
the album reached Number 30 in the UK charts.
Harry Blair, Worcester.
QUESTION Why is the recycling emoji one of the most commonly used?
EMoJI tracker is a computer program that processes every tweet posted on twitter and counts how often each emoji is used. since it was created in 2013, it has logged more than 25 billion tweets.
Nine of the ten most popular emojis feature hearts and faces, with number one being the face with tears of joy with 2.7 billion uses.
surprisingly, the fourth most popular is the universal recycling symbol (it will soon reach one billion uses) featuring three arrows pointing clockwise in a triangular formation.
Despite being green in colour, this symbol is technically called the black universal recycling symbol. It is described as black because it was created as a unicode character before the current standardised emoji set.
Its proliferation has been traced to the Islamic world where Dua or prayers are posted online.
It is increasingly popular among Muslim social media users who use apps that automatically post prayers on their behalf. these may be their own supplications or passages from the Koran.
these apps enable you to repeatedly post supplications on twitter every two hours and the recycling symbol reflects the fact it is being used repeatedly.
In terms of sheer numbers, the expression of piety and worship may rank among the most significant phenomena on twitter.
Samantha Clinton, Kings Langley, Herts.
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