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Number of its international workers that Doctors Without Borders has lost to political violence in its 34-year history : 8 [Doctors Without Borders (N.Y.C.) ] Number of them killed in Afghanistan in June : 3 [Doctors Without Borders (N.Y.C.) ] Number of American states in which one may legally shoot fish with a semi-automatic rifle : 2 [The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department (Waterbury) ] Record number of skips achieved by a stone skipper : 40 [Guinness Book of World Records 2004] Seconds by which this year’s winner of the men’s Olympic 400-meter dash was faster than the winner of the women’s : 5.81 [Ray Stefani, California State University, Long Beach ] Seconds difference in 1972 : 6.42 [Ray Stefani, California State University, Long Beach ] Factor by which the number of U.S. girls under 19 who got breast implants last year exceeded the number who did in 2002 : 3 [The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (N.Y.C.) ] Price a haunted-house supplier charges for a male figure “being tortured like never before,” flesh-ripping sounds included : $2,295 [Halloween Productions, Inc. (St. Louis) ] Estimated price a British cable company will charge for a kit to track “evidence of the paranormal” via the Internet : £150 Days since the U.S. government first placed the nation under an “elevated terror alert” that the level has been relaxed : 0 [U.S. Department of Homeland Security ] Years of “elevated” or “high” terror alerts since then : 2 [U.S. Department of Homeland Security ] Aid that U.S. leaflets dropped on Fallujah in July threatened to freeze if insurgent attacks continued : $102,000,000 [Coalition Press Center (Baghdad) ] Number of insurgent attacks in Fallujah in the week before and after the leafletting, respectively : 21, 36 [Coalition Press Center (Baghdad) ] Compensation the U.S. government has paid Iraqis for wrongful deaths, injuries, and property damage since 2002 : $4,475,643 [Coalition Press Center (Baghdad) ] Total “death gratuities” the U.S. government has paid since then to survivors of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq : $11,436,000 [Air Force Personnel Center (Randolph AFB, Tex.)/Harper’s research ] Total amount Ohio’s crime-victims compensation fund has paid the survivors of one U.S. soldier killed in Iraq : $5,656.77 [Ohio Attorney General (Columbus) ] Maximum percentage income- and corporate-tax rate under laws made for Iraqis by the Coalition Provisional Authority : 15 [International Trade Administration (Washington) ] Days a House committee postponed July hearings on antidepressants while its chair considered a pharmaceutical-lobbyist job : 50 [Congressman Jim Greenwood’s Office (Washington) ] Number of the 5 Republicans investigating Rep. Tom DeLay on ethics charges who have taken donations from his PAC : 4 [Federal Election Commission (Washington) ] Number of Ohio election boards being sued over erroneously informing parolees that they may not vote : 21 [Prison Reform Advocacy Center (Cincinnati) ] Number of banks robbed in Davenport, Iowa, while John Kerry and George Bush gave speeches there on August 4 : 3 [Davenport Police Department (Davenport, Iowa) ] Estimated number of right-wing Jewish extremists Israel monitors as potential threats to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon : 300 [Consulate General of Israel (N.Y.C.) ] Years after leaving his post during the Vietnam War that a Connecticut man was arrested for desertion in July : 34 [Bridgeport Park Police (Bridgeport, Conn.) ] Minimum number of Guantánamo detainees who boycotted their military tribunals in August : 13 [U.S. Department of Defense ] Average number of kidnappings per week in Iraq since March : 5 [The Brookings Institution (Washington) ] Number of non-Iraqis detained there by U.S. forces in the last year : 400 [Coalition Press Center (Baghdad) ] Ratio of the minimum number of beheadings by the Saudi government last year to those by Saudi terrorists so far this year : 50:1 [U.S. State Department/Amnesty International (N.Y.C.) ] Date on which Turkmenistan added questions on the president’s spiritual writings to its driver’s-license test : 6/12/04 [BBC Monitoring International Newswire, August 3, 2004/Neytralnyy Turkmenistan ] Percentage of Mississippians who have failed their written driver’s-license test since it became computerized last year : 60 [Automated Drivers License Testing System (Jackson, Miss.) ] Chance that a new light vehicle bought in the United States last year was a truck or SUV : 1 in 2 [Environmental Protection Agency (Washington) ] Minimum number of U.S. children killed since 1998 as a result of heat stroke after being left locked in cars : 219 [Jan Null, Department of Geosciences, San Francisco State University ] Rank of last year among those in which the largest number of children died this way : 1 [Jan Null, Department of Geosciences, San Francisco State University ] Square miles of surface areas between Canada and Mexico that are impervious to water : 112,610 [American Geophysical Union (Washington) ] Square miles of wetlands : 98,460 [American Geophysical Union (Washington) ] Rank of this year’s desert-locust plague in northern Africa among the world’s worst in 15 years : 1 [U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (Rome) ] Number of countries susceptible to such a plague : 65 [U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (Rome) ] Chance that a southern Sudanese woman will die in childbirth : 1 in 9 [United States Fund for UNICEF (N.Y.C.) ] Chance that a southern Sudanese girl will complete primary school : 1 in 100 [United States Fund for UNICEF (N.Y.C.) ] Projected lifespan in years of a Zimbabwean born in 1989 and one born in 2002, respectively : 60, 34 [U.N. Human Development Report Office (N.Y.C.) ]

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sig edited: no political imagery allowed. please reref to the sig guidelines

Last edited by PeacefulWarrior on Nov-10-2004 at 06:57