Dead Bulgarian's Prophecies Intrigue UK Media

Shorn of the usual political news cycle, and thrown back on royals attending church services at Christmas to supply "news", some media in the UK have given top billing over the festive season to a long dead-Bulgarian blind mystic's predictions for the coming year.

Baba Vanga, aka the "Balkan Nostradamus", died aged 85 back in 1996, but her predictions continue to cause significant interest in the UK, Balkans, Russia and elsewhere, especially in the UK among Brexiteers, because she supposedly predicted the "end of Europe" by 2016, which some insist was a reference to the UK's vote to leave the EU.

She is said to have predicted the terrorist attack on New York in 2001 when she supposedly warned that "steel birds" would attack America.

According the UK's mass market Daily Mail, among others, her most relevant prediction for the coming year is that China will become the world's number one power and that a new form of energy will be discovered on the planet Venus.

The Mail's experts believe the first prediction is all too likely but are still puzzled over the second. "There are currently no plans to send a mission to Venus," the paper observed.

The UK tabloid Sun, equally impressed by "the woman who predicted 9/11 Brexit and the rise of ISIS", noted also that she said the world would come to end in the year 3797.

Born Vangelia Pandeva Dimitrova, in Strumica, Macedonia, she apparently lost her eyesight when she was 12 as the result of a massive tornado.

A stellar list of politicians visited her or sought her views, including Tsar Boris of Bulgaria and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

There is some controversy over her prophecies, as she herself did not write them down, leaving others to do so and possibly misrepresent her...