- In the 2004 US presidential election, every city with more than 500,000 inhabitants returned a majority vote for John Kerry. (Granta, summer 2008)
- Iran's fertility rate has fallen from 6.5 in 1980 to 2.1 today. (Martin Rees speech)
- Handel and Bach were born within a month of one another and less than 100 miles apart—but never met. (Handel: The Man and His Music, by Jonathan Keates)
- During the 1960s, a top ten song in the US charts had an average of 176 words. Last year it had 436. (Harper's, August 2008)
- 135m postcards were sent last year, 30m more than in 2003. (The Guardian, 17th July 2008)
- During his first year in office, Gordon Brown introduced 2,823 laws—more than any previous prime minister in the same period. (Sunday Telegraph, 5th july 2008)
- At the 2004 Olympics, the Bahamas won just over six medals per million population—almost three times as many as any other country. (Economist.com, 3rd June 2008)
- In the US, more than 90 per cent of suicide attempts involving guns are successful. The success rate for jumping from high places is 34 per cent, and for drug overdoses just 2 per cent. (Time, 30th June 2008)
- Boeing has a patent on using the gravity of the moon to adjust the orbits of artificial satellites. (space-travel.com, 11th April 2008)
- The average ratio between the actual length of a meandering river and its length as the crow flies is pi. (Fermat's Enigma, by Simon Singh)
- Nelson Mandela has just been removed from the US terror watch list. (Daily Telegraph, 2nd July 2008)
- About one third of the goals in Euro 2008 were scored by people who were not born citizens of the country they were playing for. (Slate, 30th June 2008)
- The number of editorial corrections published in the Wall Street Journal in the first quarter of 2008, under Rupert Murdoch's stewardship, has risen by 25 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2007. (The Atlantic, July/August 2008)
- John McCain and Barack Obama are both left-handed, as were presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton; presidential candidates Al Gore, Bob Dole, John Edwards, Bill Bradley and Ross Perot; and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. (New York Sun, 23rd June 2008)
- There are an estimated 10,000 trillion ants on earth—roughly 1.6m ants for each person. Their combined weight is equivalent to the weight of the entire human population. (MSN)
- San Marino—population 30,000—has one person in prison. (New York Times, 23rd April 2008)
- In 1948, the first year of the NHS, there were 480,000 hospital beds and 167,000 people on waiting lists; today there are 167,000 beds with 1,283,100 on waiting lists. (The sun, 2nd July 2008)
- Nearly 80 per cent of al Qaeda members in Afghanistan were killed in the last months of 2001.(New Yorker, 2nd June 2008)
- Kadima won Israel's 2006 election with 22 per cent of the vote—less than the Liberal Democrats achieved in Britain in 2005. The only party in modern democracies to have won an election with a lower proportion of the vote was Israel's Labour party, which won in 1999 with 20 per cent of the vote. (politicalbetting.com, 1st June 2008)
