What does 2023 hold in store for us? Do you turn to political pundits, stock market analysts or crystal ball-gazing mystics to find out?
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev couldn't wait until new year to share his list of momentous changes in the year ahead. They included oil prices soaring to $150 per barrel and the UK re-joining the European Union, only to cause the bloc to collapse.
But that would only be the start in 2023. Following the widely-mooted Polish and Hungarian annexations of Ukraine's western regions, a German "Fourth Reich" would arise, expanding eastward as far as Kiev. That would lead to war with nuclear-armed France, resulting in a repeat of the 18th-century partition of Poland between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia. Finally, a second civil war would break out in the US, with liberal California and conservative Texas both seceding from the union.
With everyone else from the business media to interpreters of long-dead soothsayers peddling their predictions, lets us steer you through a choice few.
Spectral Forces of the Market
Like horse-racing pundits, many market experts like to give advice on what stocks and shares to bet on.
Investment bank Goldman Sachs's hot tip is commodities, which it predicts will rise in value by 40 per cent this year — after energy and food prices soared in 2022 thanks to Western sanctions on Russia. With inflation already in double digits in much of the world, that sounds like a grim forecast for the rest of us.
Standard Chartered has predicted crypto-currency Bitcoin will drop in value by around £5,000, from its current price of $16,650 per 'coin'. But that's probably a safe bet given the crisis of confidence in cryptos prompted by the collapse of Bahamas-based FTX and the extradition of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the son of a leading Democratic Party fundraiser.
Economist Scott Johnson is more optimistic about the world economy, auguring a 2.4 per cent growth rate even as several major economies slip into recession.
From Bad to Verse
Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, was a 16th-century French apothecary — a pharmacist — astrologer and reputed seer best known for his 1555 tome The Prophecies. The work consists of hundreds of quatrains, or four-line verses, foretelling various calamities in obscure and cryptic language.
Despite his predictions lacking dates, esoteric scholars believe they can be matched to historical events that occurred centuries after Nostradamus' death.
This year's round of 500-year-old forecasts include mass mortality of fish stocks — possibly due to global warming.
"Like the sun the head shall sear the shining sea: The Black Sea’s living fish shall all but boil," reads one selected line.
Another quatrain speaks of "Celestial fire on the royal edifice." One interpretation of that is for a meteorite strike burning down Buckingham Palace in London, although most interpretations of the Prophecies are not quite so literal.
More ominously, the verses predict war and carnage. "Seven months great war, people dead through evil," one reads. Could that mean the conflict in Ukraine will end by August, or that it will escalate into a global conflagration?
Another verse linked to 2023 by the 'Nostradamologists' is even more apocalyptic — in the biblical sense.
"The antichrist very soon annihilates the three. Twenty-seven years his war will last," reads the quatrain. "The unbelievers are dead, captive, exiled. With blood, human bodies, water and red hail covering the earth."
Bulgarian Babushka
A modern-day Nostradamus was Bulgarian mystic Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, better known as Baba Vanga. Born in what is now North Macedonia in 1911, she was struck blind in childhood.
After Bulgaria annexed her home region during the Second World War she began to gain widespread fame as a traditional healer and soothsayer. Many people came to her seeking knowledge of whether their loved ones had been killed in the fighting or still lived, and of their whereabouts. She even received a visit from Bulgarian Tsar Boris III in April 1942.
After the war her fame only grew. In 1966 the socialist People's Republic of Bulgaria even put Baba Vanga on the state payroll, employing two secretaries to assist her in consulting patients. Her visitors included Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Yugoslav singer and actress Silvana Armenulic — whose death two months later in a car accident she is said to have predicted.
Baba Vanga is reputed to have predicted many world historical events of the late 20th century before he death in 1996, although those who knew her dispute much of what is claimed about her. Nevertheless, among the prophesies attributed to her are three calamities in the year 2023, two cosmic and one man-made.
One of her predictions is of a devastating 'solar storm' battering the Earth, which could fry electronics, but power grids out of action and even cause electric shocks and fires. Another is for the earth's orbit to shift, potentially wreaking havoc on the climate.
More realistic perhaps is Baba Vanga's reported vision of a major country using bio-weapons in 2023. Russian forces uncovered US germ warfare activities in Ukraine shortly after the launch of the special military operation there, with efforts geared towards tailoring viruses to infect and kill people of Slavic origin.