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It's hard to feel bad for someone whose doomsday predictions caused so much anxiety, but 89-year-old Harold Camping's recent admission that he's "flabbergasted" the world didn't end last weekend sounds somewhat pitiful.
"It has been a really tough weekend," Camping said Sunday, after emerging from his Alameda, California home for the first time to talk to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. "I'm looking for answers ... But now I have nothing else to say," he said, adding that he would make a full statement today.
Camping's PR aide, Tom Evans, told the L.A. Timesthat the group is "disappointed" that 200 million true believers weren't lifted up to heaven on Saturday while everyone else suffered and eventually died as a series of earthquakes and famine destroyed the Earth. "You can imagine we're pretty disappointed, but the word of God is still true," Evans said. "We obviously went too far, and that's something we need to learn from." The group posted 2,000 billboards around the country warning of the rapture, while Camping--an uncertified fundamentalist minister--spread the word on his radio show.
Camping's Family Radio, which airs on 66 U.S. stations, has apparently rebranded itself quickly. Business Insider notes that the station's website has scrubbed all mentions of the Judgment Day. The site previously featured a countdown clock to the May 21 rapture on its homepage.
But the false prediction might not be so easily effaced from the lives of Camping's followers. The L.A. Timeswrites that Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor trailer driver, took a road trip with his family to see the Grand Canyon before the world ended.
"With maxed-out credit cards and a growing mountain of bills, he said, the rapture would have been a relief," the paper writes.
But Bauer is not angry at Camping for his false prediction. "Worst-case scenario for me, I got to see the country," he told the paper. "If I should be angry at anybody, it should be me."
Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent $140,000 of his life savings to advertise the rapture in New York, said he was dumbfounded when life went on as usual Saturday.
"I do not understand why ...," he told Reuters while awaiting the event in Times Square. "I do not understand why nothing has happened."
An NPR reporter talked to two Camping followers on Sunday. "One man, his voice quavering, said he was still holding out hope that they were one day off. Another believer asserted that their prayers worked: God delayed judgment so that more people could be saved, but the end is 'imminent,'" she reported.
Evans, Camping's PR aide, told NPR he hopes Family Radio will reimburse followers who spent their savings in anticipation of the rapture, but that he can't guarantee it.
Protesters gathered outside Camping's radio headquarters to mock the false prophecy over the weekend. Some of them set aloft a toy cow with balloons to lampoon the idea that a select elite would ascend to heaven. Meanwhile, other religious groups tried to recruit disappointed Camping followers.
Over one-quarter of the performers who took part in 1991's Wrestlemania VII have died, a wrestling website noted in the wake of the death of "Macho Man" Randy Savage.
The Wrestling Observer newsletter discovered that 14 of the 51 performers at the event have died in the past 20 years, with many of the deaths attributed to drug use (link is subscription only).
The list of wrestlers who have died since 1991 include some of the biggest stars in the sport like Savage, Andre the Giant, Miss Elizabeth and The British Bulldog. Causes of death include suicides, murder and heart attacks, some the result of years of anabolic steroid use. Savage died last week after suffering an apparent heart attack behind the wheel of his truck. His ex-wife, Miss Elizabeth, passed away after overdosing on a variety of drugs in 2003.
Looking at the list is a sobering reminder of the realities of a make-believe sport like professional wrestling. Not all of the men and women listed played a part in their own demise; referee Joey Marella was the victim of a car crash that occurred when he was driving home from a match.
As wrestlinginc.com points out, none of the 44 starters from the Super Bowl played in 1991 have passed away and only two of 44 boxers who held a championship belt that year are gone.
At 58, Savage made it nearly a decade longer than some of his deceased colleagues.
Hours after a team of U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a secret raid on his compound in Pakistan, President Barack Obama went on television to tell the nation about the triumph.
"Justice has been done," the president said.
Americans have been absorbing the world-changing news ever since, and several briefings by Obama national security officials from the White House, Defense Department, and CIA have followed. But some of the details have proven inaccurate and were later corrected, as Politico's Josh Gerstein noted.
For instance, White House spokesperson Jay Carney said Tuesday that--contrary to earlier officials' descriptions of a firefight between the Al Qaeda mastermind and U.S. forces--bin Laden didn't have a weapon during the Sunday raid. Bin Laden "was not armed," Carney said at the White House press briefing Tuesday. He was shot and killed after his wife "rushed the U.S. assaulter." You can watch Carney's exchange with the White House press corps in the video above.
Earlier, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, in a press conference Monday, said that bin Laden's wife had been killed after she was positioned as a human shield to protect bin Laden in the confrontation. Officials are now saying, however, that bin Laden's wife was injured (shot in the leg) but not killed, and that it was a separate woman who was killed by cross-fire during the forty-minute operation.
"Bin Laden died; the two al Qaeda facilitators--the brothers, who were--the courier and his brother in the compound; bin Laden's son Hamza; and the woman, presumed to be his wife, who was shielding bin Laden," Brennan said.
Asked by a reporter if bin Laden's wife was used as a shield for bin Laden, Brennan hesitated:
"I wasn't there so I hesitate to say," he said.
"But she was in front of him?" a reporter asked.
"But it was an effort to try to shield bin Laden from the ... " Brennan said, not completing the sentence, but presumably referencing the Navy SEALs then closing in on the terrorist leader.
Later in the press conference, Brennan was asked again if the woman killed was bin Laden's wife.
"That's my understanding. It was one of them," he responded.
"And he was using her as a shield?" the reporter, ABC's Jake Tapper, asked.
"She served as a shield. Again, this is my understanding--and we're still getting the reports of exactly what happened at particular moments--that when--she fought back; when there was the opportunity to get to bin Laden, she was positioned in a way that indicated that she was being used as a shield," Brennan said. "Whether or not bin Laden or the son, or whatever, put her there, or she put herself there, but, yes, that's again, my understanding that she met her demise, and my understanding is that she was one of bin Laden's wives."
A U.S. official told The Envoy Tuesday, on condition of anonymity, that Bin Laden's injured wife was left at the compound by the U.S. team. Another woman, who has not been publicly identified, was killed in the raid, the official said.
(Indeed, the New York Times reported that one of bin Laden's wives actually identified bin Laden. A former senior U.S. intelligence official told the Times it was his understanding that it was the wife shot in the leg at the scene who identified bin Laden. She was later left at the compound with several other women and children.)
U.S. officials explained the mix-up as hardly unexpected in the early aftermath of such a high-tempo operation.
"Two women were shot here. It sounds like their fates were mixed up," a U.S. official told Politico's Gerstein. "This is hours old and the full facts are still being ascertained as those involved are debriefed."
In total, the U.S. official said Tuesday, five people were killed in the raid: Bin Laden, his adult son, the Al Qaeda courier, the courier's brother, and an adult female — "not [bin Laden's] wife."
Ambiguity still surrounds the key break in the effort to track bin Laden down--the al Qaeda courier U.S. officials monitored and followed to the Abbottabad compound. The Associated Press reported Monday the man in question was a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani who used the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti; the CIA later determined that his actual name was Sheikh Abu Ahmed, the AP reported.
But there are some suggestions that the courier's name and identity may be provisional too. Earlier reportssuggested that Abd al-Khaliq Jan was the identity of the courier in question.
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