<iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-K3L4M3" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden">

Barometer

Which country locks up the most people?

17 August 2019

9:00 AM

17 August 2019

9:00 AM

Girls only

Polish village Miejsce Odrzanskie was reported not to have had a single boy born in the past decade, though 12 girls have been born in the same period. However, such an imbalance is far from a freak occurrence:
 
— Assuming a 50-50 chance of a baby being male or female, the probability of 12 girls born in succession is one in 4,096. Given that there are 10,000 parishes in Poland, you would expect at any one time for there to be two to three whose last dozen births were all female.
— There is an equal chance that 12 boys will be born in succession.
 

Powerless

A million British people were reported to have been left without electricity when a gas power station and wind farm both failed. How does that compare with people left without power in some of history’s biggest outages?
 

India, July 2012 620m
Indonesia, August 2019 100m
Southern Brazil, March 1999 97m
Italy, September 2003 56m
Eastern US/Canada, August 2003 55m
And in Britain:
Great Storm, 1987 1.5m
Miners’ strike, 1972 1.2m


 

Banged up

 
The government is to review prison sentences. How does our incarceration rate of 140 per 100,000 compare with that of other countries?
 

HIGHEST
US 655
El Salvador 615
Turkmenistan 552
Virgin Islands 542
Thailand 512
Cuba 510
LOWEST
Guinea-Bissau 10
Central African Republic 16
Republic of Congo 27
India 33
Oman 36
Nigeria 36

(England and Wales ranks at number 112 out of 223)
Source: World Prison Brief
 

Dropped off

 
What does it cost to drop off a passenger directly outside our biggest airports?
 

Heathrow Free
Gatwick Free
Stansted £4 for 10 mins
Luton £4 for 13 mins
Manchester £3 for 5 mins

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it. Try your first month for free, then just $2 a week for the remainder of your first year.


Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator Australia readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Close