The nearest any of the predictions came to fulfilment was a mock enactment of the space-station crash, which attracted thousands of tourists to the town of Condom, in Gers.. THE SPICE GIRLS may be a bunch of “bimbos” who think they invented the concept of “girl power” in 1996. They booed and whistled whenever clouds spoilt their fun.Several apocalyptic sects – and the couturier Paco Rabanne – had forecast that the eclipse would be accompanied by widespread devastation, including the destruction of Paris and/or parts of the departement of Gers by Mir crashing to Earth. The ship’s captain found a cloudless patch of sky for the full duration of the eclipse in mid-Channel.In Paris, tens of thousands of people blocked the Place de la Concorde, the Champs de Mars and bridges over the Seine in the hope of getting a better view of the almost complete eclipse over the capital. Many of the glasses were destroyed in the process.
Were the rioters moonstruck or sunstruck? In many parts of the 60-mile wide band of total eclipse in northern France, from Cherbourg to Strasbourg, it was difficult to be anything but cloud-struck. Although the French skies were not completely covered, the town of Noyon, north of Paris, chosen as the official viewing spot by the Societe Astronomique de France, suffered a total grey-out. Reims, a little to the east, managed to see five seconds of total eclipse, instead of the full two minutes.Passengers on board the Brittany Ferries ship Normandie, travelling between Caen and Portsmouth, were luckier.

DESPITE APOCALYPTIC forecasts that the Moon would become glued to the Sun and the Mir space station would fall on Paris, the most untoward incident in France before or during yesterday’s brief mid-day darkening of the skies was a sunglasses riot in Marseilles. Scores of people – mostly middle-aged men – fought over 5,000 free pairs of “eclipse glasses” that were being distributed in the car park of a shopping mall. In Naples, the superstitious played Lotto numbers pertaining to the eclipse.. In Italy’s economic centre, Milan, where there was a 92-per-cent eclipse, thousands of people abandoned offices and shops to gaze upwards. Police in the capital had issued warnings that thieves might go into action while the city was distracted, but there was no reported surge in thefts.

Two young Israeli boys on holiday in the city took advantage of their parents’ distraction and disappeared but were found soon afterwards in a nearby street. Welders’ helmets and sheets of special glass were shared around.Four babies were born in Rome during the eclipse. In most cases, eclipse-viewing glasses were scarce, after a last-minute run on opticians and hardware stores. The few remaining functionaries at the Prime Minister’s office flocked on to the terrace and the labourers involved in roadworks ahead of the Holy Year 2000 took a break from their diggers.Though the Sun was only 84 per cent obscured over Rome, the sky darkened and there was a slight drop in temperature.

Press reports had indicated he would watch the entire event from the helicopter but pictures shot by Vatican television showed him staring through tinted glass from the terrace of his summer residence with a group of Polish astronomer friends.
With most Romans having fled the city, those left behind poured into the streets to glimpse the astral phenomenon. “I’ll stop now, as I know that some among you are in a hurry to view the eclipse,” he told his audience in the Vatican before flying by helicopter to his holiday residence at Castelgandolfo in time for the event. THE POPE joined millions of Italians scrutinising the sky yesterday after cutting short his weekly audience so as not to miss the last eclipse of the millennium. That work, probably the finest novel to be written about the belief in Communism, referred to an ideological, rather than celestial, darkening of the heavens.For some, events such as eclipses and a new millennium are a sign of a coming apocalypse.In nearby Bulgaria, still- believing Communists say the eclipse signifies at last the end of capitalist days, when, finally, the proletariat will march on towards the new socialist dawn.”The world will be covered with darkness and then the Sun will rise again to bring back to life the idea of Communism, the most humane system,” said the Bulgarian Communist Party leader, Viktor Spasov.”Misery, poverty and exploitation will be buried, the working class will rise to strike back against cruel capitalism,” said Mr Spasov, who was an anti-fascist guerrilla in the Second World War.. The end of the world will come when it comes.”But others see the darkening across the former Soviet bloc as a sign that the end of its days is at hand.It was the Soviet empire that inspired the Hungarian-born British author Arthur Koestler to write Darkness at Noon. At 2min 23sec it beat the Balaton resorts by a second or two.A few miles away, in the Govora monastery, run by Romanian Orthodox nuns, the sisters dismissed the popular belief that the eclipse is a portent of doom.”There is no use in worrying,” said Mother Hurvima “We are not interested in the eclipse. Some Hungarians argued that it was the country’s roots in shamanism, which reveres forces of nature, that triggered such interest in the eclipse in the Magyar psyche.The total eclipse lasted longest at the Romanian city of Ramnicu Valcea, about 100 miles north of Bucharest.