Thank David Stern for his staggering sanctimoniousness in this opaque cataclysm.

FORBES: NBA Lockout: 10 Consequences of an Extended Work Stoppage

The doomsday scenarios of climate cataclysm lie in the fat tail.

FORBES: Throwing Cold Water On The U.N.'s Fat Tail

It has kept you, or someone you love, from having to fight and possibly die in the kind of global cataclysm using non-nuclear (or "conventional") weapons that engulfed our countrymen and untold millions of others twice in the last century, before the dawn of the nuclear age.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Your Deterrent: What's at stake at the Moscow summit

But Blizzard hopes that Cataclysm will help fight stagnation in World of Warcraft and keep paying users playing.

FORBES: 'World of Warcraft' Launches 'Cataclysm' Expansion To Keep Up Billion-Dollar Revenues

Written in these circumstances, the diary offers an immediacy that few documentary sources can in the day-to-day record and analysis of this cataclysm.

UNESCO: 2012 UK Memory of the World Register

If the cataclysm of the first world war had destroyed any belief in the immutability of a civilisation based on liberal, progressive British values, the origins of the morbid age can also be found in developments in the natural and social sciences that occurred well before 1914.

ECONOMIST: Britain between the wars

History suggests that, in the absence of nuclear deterrence, the world would eventually be plunged yet again into the sort of cataclysm that twice scarred the 20th Century.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Dangerous disarmers

The Egyptian cataclysm slots into Israel's endless national debate, much as Anwar Sadat's assassination did in 1981, when Mr Mubarak assumed power.

ECONOMIST: Egypt��s upheaval is rattling the Israelis