PEOPLE BEING PEOPLE

Russian members of parliament have written to the country’s three main TV stations demanding that they stop airing programs about a Mayan doomsday prophecy that the world will end on Dec. 21. Many Russians have become so obsessed with the impending apocalypse that the Kremlin’s minister for emergency situations took the unusual step of issuing official reassurance last week that the world was not about to end. He did note, however, that Russians would remain vulnerable to blizzards and transportation problems—a prediction that rapidly came true on the weekend, with a 125-mile, three-day traffic jam on the snowbound motorway between St. Petersburg and Moscow.