- 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]
