Facts - Bits and Pieces
There are just 15 professional ventriloquists left in Britain. [Independent on Sunday, 18th May 2003]
On an academic list of the ten most frequently cited sources of all time, Noam Chomsky ranks eighth-above Hegel and Cicero, just below Plato and Freud. [New Yorker, 31st March 2003]
Pakistan can export anything to India, but India is permitted to export only 600 items to Pakistan. [Far Eastern Economic Review, 22nd May 2003]
Japan has the second largest military budget in the world. [New York Times Magazine, 4th May 2003]
3,000 guillotine executions were carried out in Paris during the Terror; 10,000 were carried out under the Nazis in 1944 and 1945 alone. [Guillotine:The Timbers of Justice by Robert Frederick Opie]
Peanuts are used as an ingredient in dynamite. [Charlotte Observer, 13th May 2001]
Penalty notices are issued to about 20,000 drivers entering London's congestion charge zone every day. [Prospect, page 13]
In 2002, there were 199 terrorist incidents recorded worldwide-the lowest total since 1969. [US state department]
Richard Perle is a member of the Democratic party. [Panorama, 19th May 2003]
John Corzine spent more on winning his Senate seat in 2000 than the total spend of every political party in the British general election of 2001. [New York Review of Books, 15th May 2003]
Suicide in Britain fell by 40 per cent between 1963 and 1975, probably because of the phasing out of carbon monoxide from the gas supply. [The Observer, 27th April 2003]
In Britain last year, there were 8.3 work-related deaths per million working population. This compares to 38 per million in the EU and 52 per million in the US. [The Economist, 24th May 2003] |