Welcome to The World in 2012

CASSANDRA returns—not perhaps with the flourish of an Arnold Schwarzenegger terminator, but still with the ambition to predict the events of the coming year in company with The Economist’s The World in 2012 (which will appear on the world’s newsstands this week).

Readers of this blog may recall from last year that Cassandra, the beautiful daughter of Troy’s King Priam, was cursed by Apollo (she had spurned his amorous advances) to make prophecies that were accurate—but not believed. Our hope is that the predictions of this particular Cassandra will be believed—even if, perish the thought, they turn out to be false.

With some predictions, we should be on safe ground. There will, for example, be presidential elections in America, France and Russia (and while we may be reluctant to forecast the results in the US and France, we can be pretty confident that Russia’s next president will be Vladimir Putin). And there will doubtless be natural catastrophes, such as this year’s nuclear disaster at Fukushima, that no one can forecast (though The World in 2012 thinks that, just possibly, there will be an earthquake on America’s Pacific coast to complete, after the quakes this year in New Zealand and Japan, the seismologists’ so-called “ring of fire”).

 One immovable date on the calendar will be the London Olympics, which will open in July. It seems rather doubtful that the classical Cassandra had an interest in the original Olympics (she was, after all, a creature of mythology), but this particular Cassandra (male and British) confesses to a passion for sport. In the coming weeks there may well be a few references to football (the soccer kind), rugby and tennis, along with the assertion that cricket is the noblest sport of all. Annoyed readers can always protest, and Cassandra promises to read their comments.