US doomsday minister Harold Camping dead at 92

Harold Camping, the US preacher who used his evangelical radio ministry and thousands of billboards to broadcast the end of the world and then gave up public prophecy when his date-specific doomsdays did not come to pass, has died at age 92.
Camping, a retired civil engineer who built a worldwide following for the nonprofit Oakland, California-based ministry he founded in 1958, died at his home Sunday, said Family Radio Network marketing manager Nina Romero. She said he had been hospitalised after falling.
Camping's most widely spread prediction was that the Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011. His independent Christian media empire spent millions of dollars some of it from donations made by followers who quit their jobs and sold all their possessions to spread the word on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.

When the Judgment Day he foresaw did not materialise, the preacher revised his prophecy, saying he had been off by five months.
The preacher, who suffered a stroke three weeks after the May prediction failed, said the light dawned on him that instead of the biblical Rapture in which the faithful would be swept up to the heavens, the date had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which placed the entire world under Christ's judgment.
But after the cataclysmic event did not occur in October either, Camping acknowledged his apocalyptic prophecy had been wrong and posted a letter on his ministry's site telling his followers he had no evidence the world would end anytime soon, and wasn't interested in considering future dates.

"We realise that many people are hoping they will know the date of Christ's return," Camping wrote in March 2012. "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing."
Camping graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1942 and started a construction business shortly after the end of World War II, according to his nonprofit's website.
For decades, Camping and his family attended the Christian Reformed Church, where he served as an elder and Bible teacher, but he left the church in 1988 when he felt it no longer faithfully represented biblical teachings, associates said.