33,203 source-backed world facts - each attributed to a named person and a number, linked to the original source. Page 322 of 333.
“seven new outlets”
“The snails can grow to more than 20 centimetres long”
“The region is home to two-thirds of the planet’s proven reserves”
“10 per cent”
“enjoy feasting on 500 species of plants”
“and, during this decade, it is expected to double its share of the world’s oil production.”
“0.5 per cent for a fifth consecutive month”
“were first reported in Solomon Islands in 2006”
“Over a third of natural gas reserves are in the Middle East”
“Sam Seke brought this story to Pacific Beat audiences in 2007, after farmers spotted two snails on North Guadalcanal”
“with another third in the former Soviet Union.”
“the seemingly unstoppable rise of air travel – due to increase tenfold over the next 50 years”
“notably the soil erosion and desertification that have affected two-thirds of the world’s cropland”
“anywhere between 6BC and 10AD”
“the three”
“probably only one”
“pilgrims gathering in Bethlehem on 25 December have been duped”
“No less a figure than Pope John Paul II pronounced in 1999 that heaven was a “blessed community” which was “neither abstraction nor physical place””
“So in the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons, taking his lead from the Book of Revelation, with its description of heaven as a rebuilt Jerusalem, held that the chosen would, for a thousand years after their death, inhabit what was in effect…”
“the “Great Light shines in three circles””
“2,001 years ago”
“Organised religion offers two basic varieties of heaven”
“In the one and only conversation I ever had with my mother about death”
“Aristotle in fourth-century Athens started the tradition”
“John Morgan (who died this year after a fall, aged 41)”
“With other damage caused by storms, the total bill for reopening train services through the West Country is reckoned to be more than £500m.”
“Not only did it cost us £6bn, but we get blamed every time the 8.02 from Surbiton is late.”
“The chief executive of Railtrack, a former bean counter called Steven Marshall, receives the same news from his Great Western zonal director, who says it’s going to cost £500m.”
“We could tell them that, without their help, Cornwall will be cut off for six months. That will bring us a few millions.”
“It receives an annual £1bn in government subsidy.”
“The company would have to be bought from its shareholders for £5bn-6bn (the current valuation suggested by the share price), three times the amount obtained for its sale.”
“All the train operating companies’ existing franchises run out between 2003 and 2012.”
“Sir Alastair Morton, chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority, is trying to relet the franchises early: he is offering 20- year terms in exchange for promises of investment from the operators.”
“British Rail was split into around a hundred parts, which were flogged off individually: they include Railtrack, the 25 train operators, the 14 renewal and maintenance companies, the three rolling-stock companies, the two freight operators…”
“(4 per cent of the world’s population, but 26 per cent of its oil consumption)”
“Japan switched on the Christmas lights at the beginning of the month, only a few days later than London’s West End and, it has to be said, with altogether more panache.”
“In the Tokyo suburb of Ikebukuro, real snow made by, and showered from, special snow machines will fall inside the town from 22 December through to Christmas Day.”
“even now, fewer than 1 per cent of Japanese are practising Christians.”
“I have been visiting Japan for more than 30 years, but never before have I felt the thrust of a cultural revolution so powerfully as on this occasion.”
“Its failure to direct the Meteorological Office to relocate its headquarters from Bracknell (Berkshire) to the north-east caused anger and dismay in a region that desperately needs the 1,500 highly skilled jobs. Instead, the jobs will go t…”
“It’s true that unemployment’s dropped [to 10.2 per cent in Blyth] through the New Deal, but it’s really just a massage exercise.”
“The economy in my constituency’s falling to bits. We haven’t had a start-up business in Blyth for more than two years.”
“Ronnie Campbell, MP for Blyth Valley for 14 years, says:”
“A report imminent from the Archaeological Institute of America concludes that no less than 80 per cent of all "ancient" west African sculpture on the market – especially Nok and Ife terracottas – are fake.”
“Published earlier this month, it identifies more than 1,250 fakes in the world’s greatest museums”
“16 in the British Museum”
“21 in the Ashmolean”
“37 in the Louvre”
“45 in the Met”
“12 in Glasgow’s Burrell Collection”
“the fact that about 80 per cent of the artefacts which pass through the antiquities trade have no definite provenance.”
“Muscarella identifies 24 categories of near eastern antiquities that are known only from unprovenanced items”
“...the latter became the cultural hero of the new Russia with films such as Burnt by the Sun, which won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 1994 and the Oscar for best foreign film in 1995.”
“It was replaced by Mikhalkov’s anthem in 1944, so that the Soviet Union could be seen to express the relief of the nation and its gratitude to Stalin for saving it from German annihilation.”
“This had only a 12-year life – until, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev unveiled, in his secret speech, some of Stalin’s crimes (those committed on party members).”
“For 21 years, while Alexandrov’s music was played, no words were sung. It was only in 1977, relatively late in Brezhnev’s long political career, that the anthem was rejigged...”
“The party of Lenin, the strength of the people Leads us toward the triumph of communism!”
“By 1991, the party of Lenin was leading no one anywhere: though the official anthem remained unchanged until the Red Flag was pulled down from above the Kremlin at the end of that year and the tricolour raised. A new national hymn was firs…”
“Damilola Taylor’s tragic death on the North Peckham estate in November provoked Lord Harris, the Tory peer and carpet magnate, to donate £2m to build a youth club in his memory.”
“Harris may have been a staunch Thatcherite and the man who set the Tory party’s finances on a more solid footing in the mid-1990s, but that did not prevent him from donating more than £100m to charity in recent years.”
“As his fortune now sits at perhaps £160m, he has given away about 40 per cent of his potential wealth.”
“The entire Soros fortune – about $5bn in all – is to be given away.”
“Last year, he spent $500m and, having turned 70 in August, he is determined to have spent the lot by the time he is 80 on his favoured philanthropic causes in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe.”
“Feeney then gave all but £5m of his money to a host of worthy causes and went into longed-for obscurity.”
“Just look at the latest accounts of Grosvenor Estate Holdings, the Duke of Westminster’s main company. It did give a tasty sum of £550,108 to the Westminster Foundation, which supports a wide range of charities.”
“Westminster is widely reckoned to be the richest Briton, with nearly £4bn in assets to his name.”
“Late in 1999, the looming millennium finally embarrassed the Church of England into admitting that, in 1997, average weekly church attendances had fallen below one million for the first time.”
“The Catholic congregation is larger, just over one million, but is none the less falling at the same rate of around 2 per cent a year.”
“The UK Evangelical Alliance now has more than one million members.”
“Put these figures together and we have around four million regular Christian worshippers in Britain”
“a number that nudges the 15 per cent defined by trend analysts as the necessary presence to start creating a consensus.”
“a Gallup poll for the Daily Telegraph revealing that more than half of self-professed British Christians go to church only on special occasions and can’t name any of the four gospels.”
“The answer is three or more, each better attended than the last. First, the regular Sunday service at Peckham Methodist Church, then a memorial service, at which Damilola’s family spoke movingly of their loss, and finally a special service…”
“For 21 years, while Alexandrov’s music was played, no words were sung. It was only in 1977, relatively late in Brezhnev’s long political career, that the anthem was rejigged to exclude the 'friend of the toiling masses' and include the peo…”
“The six million members of what is proportionately the biggest public sector in the developed world are insulated from both.”
“an author of Labour’s famous 1945 election manifesto, this is the man who created the Consumers’ Association, the Open University and more than 50 other public initiatives and charities for a dizzying range of causes.”
“In the case of the Consumer Advisory Association, later to become the Consumers’ Association, Young went ahead and set it up by himself, producing, in 1955, the first issue of a magazine that was later to become Which?”
“I wrote a report on fog lamps and electric heaters,” Young remembers – but, although about 200 journalists attended his initial press conference, there was not a single word about his new magazine in the papers the following day: all were …”
“By the end of three months, we had 10,000 members; by the end of six months, we had about 500,000.”
“by the year 2065, the cost of the damage caused by global warming will have outstripped world GDP”
“18 months after the severe floods of Easter 1998”
“six to nine months”
“1,000 people were flooded out”
“within 20 years”
“Umm al-Fahm was swallowed up in 1948, as the nascent Jewish state spilled over the borders set out for it by the UN. Today, it comprises a populous triangle of Arab towns absorbed into the northern part of the Jewish homeland.”
“Since his Islamic Movement won the municipal elections in 1989, the 58-year-old technocrat has transformed an otherwise unimportant regional town of 40,000 into the hub of an Arab spiritual and political revival.”
“For Sheikh Ra’id, the toll, which rose to 13 last month, is the price that justice demands.”
“The father of 24-year-old Mohammad Jabbareen, shot in the chest with a dumdum-type bullet, solemnly accepts the 20,000-shekel gratuity the delegation has brought to perpetuate his legacy.”
“Around 80,000 people poured into town for the funeral, Israel’s largest ever.”
“The problem is not supply of food – the world already produces 354kg of grain per person per year, enough for everyone.”
“Crop yields are so much lower in organic farming, he claimed, that for Europe to feed itself organically an extra 28 million hectares (69 million acres) would have to be ploughed up – equal to the entire forest cover of France, Germany, De…”
“The announcement was made by Unesco’s World Heritage Convention last week.”
“The Blaenafon Ironworks, opened in 1789, spawned 16 collieries in the area;”
“Big Pit, one such colliery, is one of only two mining museums in Britain.”
“According to Unesco, the furnaces and buildings of the works are the best preserved in Europe.”
“Not including the unmarked mass cholera graves, around 60 per cent of 19th-century burials were of children under five years of age.”
“the 1819 Peterloo massacre in Manchester, the Chartist demonstration for electoral reform in which 11 people were killed.”
“He was the Scot James Keir Hardie, elected not in England, but in Merthyr Tydfil in 1900.”
“In The Merthyr Rising, published in 1978, Williams documented the events leading to the unjustified hanging of the first working-class martyr in Britain, Dic Penderyn.”
“When Edward VIII visited Blaenafon in 1936, he was appalled by the human devastation wreaked by the industrial revolution. "Something must be done," he declared.”
