33,203 source-backed world facts - each attributed to a named person and a number, linked to the original source. Page 325 of 333.
“BT has made tens of thousands of engineers redundant”
“At $750m in Japanese central government costs alone, it was the most expensive G8 summit ever.”
“Clinton’s $300m “food for education” programme”
“In Denver, he was also asked by his fellow leaders to produce a report on international drug crime for the Birmingham G8, which he hosted in 1998. The G8 interior and justice ministers produced, yes, a ten-point action plan. At least it wa…”
“In the 1980s, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher and Christian Democracy dominated the European agenda.”
“In the 1980s, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher and Christian Democracy dominated the European agenda. Left-wing parties in Europe, not least in Britain, looked at Gonzalez and the PSOE with a mixture of envy and pride.”
“Social democracy is now the dominant force in Europe. France, Germany, Italy and Britain all have centre-left governments, as do most of the smaller states, with the notable exception of Austria.”
“to pay for perhaps as many as 25 new tram networks.”
“Most travel in Britain is local: 70 per cent of all trips and 56 per cent of car trips are shorter than five miles.”
“In inner London, 40 per cent of all journeys are on foot; in Bath, 25 per cent of residents walk to work.”
“walking and cycling account for seven times as many trips in Holland as public transport.”
“for the price of one tram scheme, you could buy safe routes to 3,500 schools, more than 19,000 pedestrian crossings or 230,000 road humps.”
“in the first six months of 1999, for instance, only five of the 805 Afghan applications for asylum to this country were refused”
“Over the past few years, 93 per cent of the applicants from Afghanistan were given refugee status or exceptional leave to remain”
“To date, 73 of the hostages have returned to Afghanistan”
“At that stage, only 17 people wanted to return to their home country”
“After more than four hours of harassment and intimidation, that number rose to 73”
“In the end, two men and their dependants were granted refugee status, but 27 cases were rejected”
“27 cases were rejected on the grounds that the Home Secretary “was not satisfied that they have a well-founded fear of persecution by reason of their race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group or political opini…”
“Those 27 Afghans are in hostels in London, and their case is being heard in London”
“They had freed nearly 170 people from an oppressive government whose appalling human rights record is known throughout the world”
“The Home Office claims their return was voluntary”
“Amnesty International immediately wrote to the Home Secretary, expressing its concern that Britain is not meeting its international obligations towards those in need of protection against persecution or other inhumane treatment”
“Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, wasted no time in expressing his desire “to see removed from this country all those on the plane as soon as reasonably practicable””
“the 1951 Refugee Convention does not require an asylum-seeker to have “embarked on a given journey with the intention of claiming asylum in order for a subsequent asylum application to be granted””
“Straw is talking about amending the 1951 convention: his intention, it is clear, is to tighten the rules of entry into this country”
“Jan Shaw, the refugee officer for Amnesty UK, argues that the convention should not in any way be tampered with, for it “remains the most important international instrument for the protection of those fleeing human rights violations””
“Hundreds of moose at £2,800 each, in a city that is cutting funding for shelters for the homeless.”
“in the past five years, inequality of income, after tax and support payments, has risen by 10 per cent”
“a procession of perhaps a hundred toddlers marched by, many of them not older than four or five”
“It was founded by Lady Phillips, the wife of one of the great Randlords, and was opened in 1915 by the Duke of Connaught.”
“The initial collection comprised French impressionists and 19th-century British, Dutch and Belgian artists. There were no South African paintings.”
“The solution for many of the dispossessed – perhaps as many as 12,000 – is on eGoli’s jam-packed streets.”
“South Africa is a confusing country. The ANC formally expressed a “deep sense of regret” at his early death, aged 49, of an Aids-related illness.”
“It did not mention that Khoza still faced 19 charges stemming from the violence that tore apart black townships around Johannesburg at the time of our democratic change”
“Wintercomfort says that 162 residents were th”
“France was one of 107 countries attending the conference, which was dedicated to the theme of democracy. [...] Of the attendees, 106 signed the declaration. France did not.”
“107 countries had come to support democracy, but 106 really did”
“During its six-month presidency, France will try to coax other 'pioneers', such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Finland, to agree with the Franco-German push for closeness.”
“while the EU 'has to find wide agreement on better procedures for enhanced co-operation', he still 'could not imagine any core of Europe existing without Britain'”
“France was one of 107 countries attending the conference, which was dedicated to the theme of democracy. ... Of the attendees, 106 signed the declaration. France did not.”
“France, which now holds the presidency of the European Union, is the most credible recaster of the European-US relationship.”
“while the EU “has to find wide agreement on better procedures for enhanced co-operation”, he still “could not imagine any core of Europe existing without Britain”.”
“four British science graduates were taken hostage”
“approaching 80,000”
“200 people”
“4,000 metres up”
“On the night of 10 January 1995, 100 Customs officers raided a catamaran, the Frugal, as it lay off the Sussex coast.”
“There were no drugs on board. The officers kept searching, and at dawn got very lucky when they saw 309kg of cocaine and four passports bearing Dobbels’s features abandoned on a beach.”
“Both had been watched for two years.”
“a home from home for the 300 or so British truckers who work the route up from Morocco, importing textiles and foodstuffs into Europe.”
“a rambling but fact-filled babble about his 16 months on the Casablanca route”
“Ten days ago, I had cars flashing at me because there were stowaways on the roof. When I got to Tangier, seven or eight trucks had been attacked.”
“Once he reached Tangier with stowaways aboard. [...] When the truck arrived in Manchester, the driver found that one stowaway had stayed in, undiscovered. He was dead by this time, from the heat or suffocation, after three days on the road.”
“Kent Brown, the American director of the Service Centre, has heard of three stowaways dying this year.”
“From a rough survey among Moroccan migrants living in shacks and working in hothouses in Andalucia, I found that about a third had crossed in the well-known and frequently overloaded small boats. A third had simply slipped aboard a ferry. …”
“When the desiccated body of George Mallory was found high on the north face of Everest last year”
“Seventy-five years before, Mallory and his youthful partner, Sandy Irvine, had disappeared into the mist shrouding the summit”
“the three 1920s Everest expeditions”
“At 17 came the first evidence of dissent”
“He twice made sexual overtures to Strachey”
“Duncan Grant, who attended at least one Pen y Pass party.”
“Mallory was astounded by the epochal post-impressionist exhibition of 1910”
“Mallory’s marriage in 1914 brought him into contact with other new worlds.”
“In 1921, Mallory was invited to join the first Everest expedition.”
“At 34, he was one of the youngest members”
“When he returned to Everest in 1922, the team was younger and more congenial.”
“When Mallory was asked to join the third Everest expedition in 1924”
“by then, he and Ruth had three children”
“If all 0131 calls were free, I think it likely that BT would see its business flourish. It could derive income from advertising at the beginning or end of free calls, and the burghers would become so tempted by use of the phone that they w…”
“The government has directed BT to surrender its control of ‘the local loops’ by 2001”
“InterMutual Financial Services offers the full range of money services from credit cards to insurance contracts – with the added attraction that it issues shares in itself as you buy its products or services. IMFS is still a tiddler compar…”
“Edinburgh’s powerful conservation lobby lives in dread that the current boom will undermine the city’s architectural heritage.”
“Today, Edinburgh has half a dozen major development points, plus a host of smaller ones.”
“a quality-of-life survey of 218 major cities ranked it 55 in the world and second in the UK – behind London and above Edinburgh”
“I’ve been a debenture holder on Number One Court for four years now.”
“the sight of a mobile phone, even one that is switched off, is enough get you seven days in the glasshouse.”
“the sun might blaze for 30 minutes before there’s a chance of them coming off again.”
“I handed the two delighted boys my tickets only to face the wrath of a very aggressive security guard.”
“We travel about 6,000 kilometres a year, 300 per cent more than we did in the 1960s, most of it by car.”
“Zurichers take 410 trips by bus, tram and train annually; in Manchester, the figure is around a third of that.”
“In the 1960s, transport accounted for 10 per cent of Scottish family expenditure. It now accounts for nearly 18 per cent, three-quarters of it on motoring.”
“In 1998, Professor Bob Holman of Glasgow University found that, in Easterhouse, car ownership stuck fast at 20 per cent between 1986 and 1996, with no prospect of increasing.”
“No statistics are more damning than the contrast between capital investment in transport in the London area – £23m – and in Scotland, where Railtrack’s “network enhancement” budget for 2004 was £2m.”
“the global costs of road transport – congestion, pollution, accidents – estimated by Professor David Pearce of London University in 1995, outrun direct costs by a factor of three.”
“At the moment, 15 per cent of the world’s people own 85 per cent of the world’s cars, and our climate is in a mess.”
“What happens if, say, 30 per cent of the world’s people avail themselves of the “benefits” that Macdonald praises?”
“Shamina works for us. She is like our daughter. His real daughter has been sleeping for more than an hour. Shamina receives no wage.”
“Arif was ten when he went to live in a garment factory in Dhaka.”
“When the children had to leave the factory, we were told to go the same day. The owner gave us 200 taka [about US$4].”
“Roubel is earning 500 taka a month (US $10), and this will rise now he is doing a man’s work.”
“He was an “apprentice” without pay for two years.”
“These are the realities of child labour that lay behind the collapse of the fateful meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999.”
“since Bangladesh had by then become the seventh largest exporter of garments to the US.”
“The most dramatic effort by the west to get children out of factories was the Harkin Bill that went before the US Congress in 1992. This measure would have banned the import of garments made with child labour.”
“The new orthodoxy – enunciated by the most recent International Labour Organisation convention in 1998 – is that the abolition of child labour is impossible, but a more gradual prohibition of the most damaging and hazardous occupations may…”
“He, like 50 per cent of working-age Zimbabweans, is unemployed.”
“Amid the violence – about 30 killed and some 6,000 forced to flee their homes – what chance is there for a free and fair election?”
“Of the 90 elections IRI has observed in 40 countries since 1984, Zimbabwe’s is the worst we have ever seen . . . the process is so flawed it cannot adequately reflect the will of the people”
“This is precisely what happened in Australia, where euthanasia was legal for a very short time: a change of government brought a swift change in the law, and only four cases of legal euthanasia actually took place.”
