Salient

Pecking Order

By Salient | 30 Jul, 2007

Percentage of New Zealanders over 18 who believe Bain is innocent, according to a recent poll: 66

Percentage who believed this five years ago: 40

Number of times 15-year-old Kori Trevithick stabbed 77-year-old Doreen Reed during a break-in last January: 25

Minimum non-parole period, in years, for Kori’s life sentence: 14

Number of times police officers were caught by speed cameras last year: 685

Number of these tickets that were waived: 435

Litres needed to support one tank in an armoured division for one day: 6517

Number of times a Chevy Geo could circle the Earth on the same amount of fuel: 3.5

Percentage of people that wouldn’t bid on Helen Clark’s old family car: 65.8

Chance that a police officer in South Africa is not licensed to drive: 1 in 10

Percentage of South African farmland owned by whites in 1994 and 2005, respectively: 87, 84

Number of black U.S. senators during the entire 1800s, the entire 1900s, and today, respectively: 2, 2, 1

Number of years since the Eastbourne Bowling Club last considered allowing women to become full members: 100

Year in which King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked newspapers to refrain from publishing pictures of women: 2006

Tonnes of carbon dioxide added to the greenhouse effect by burning Kuwait oil wells in one day: 100,000

Year in which Tony Blair told Al Jazeera that western intervention in Iraq had been “pretty much of a disaster”: 2006

Number of AK-47s that have gone missing after being sent by the Pentagon to Iraq in 2005: 26,000

Ratio in December of the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to the number from Britain, the second-largest contributor: 16:1

Percentage of workers in Wellington, Auckland and the West Coast that earn over $100,000 per year respectively: 5.2, 4.3, 1.6

Number of homeless San Franciscans hired to be extras in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith as a formerly homeless millionaire: 2501

Amount they were paid hourly: $10.80

Days after the DVD release of Borat that it became the top item shipped to Kazakhstan by Amazon.co.uk : 4

Number of erotic Harry Potter fan-fiction stories posted on a website run by an Illinois woman: 1,750

Average number of hits the site receives each day: 198,000

Average percentage decline in U.K. child injuries during weekends when a new Harry Potter book is released: 46

Estimated number of visitors each week to the grave of Harry Potter, a Briton buried in Israel in 1939: 45

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SOURCES: 1, 2. Dominion Post; 3, 4. Dominion Post 20 June 2007; 5, 6. Dominion Post; 7, 8, 15. Earth Island Journal, Spring 1991, Vol. 6, Issue 2; 9. Stuff.co.nz; 10. Institute for Security Studies (Johannesburg); 11. International Crisis Group (Washington); 12. U.S. Senate Historical Office; 13. The Dominion Post; 14. http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060516/D8HL1T7O1.html \o “Link to article” AP via MyWay.com; 16. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2459292,00. html \o “Link to article” Times Online; 17. Amnesty International (London); 18. U.S. Department of Defense/U.K. Ministry of Defence (London)/Permanent Mission of Italy to the U.N. (N.Y.C.); 19. The Sunday Star Times; 20,21. Sony Pictures (Culver City, Calif.); 23, 24. Vicki Dolenga (Schaumburg, Ill.); 25. Stephen Gwilym, John Radcliffe Hospital (Oxford, England); 26. Ramle Museum (Ramle, Israel).

E-mail Pecking Orders to editor@Salient.org.nz