Interesting Facts

21st August 1770 – James Cook formally claimed eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales. 1831 – Nat Turner led black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. 1879 – The Virgin Mary, along with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, reportedly appeared to the people of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland. Paving the way for lots of little plastic figurines. 1911 – The Mona Lisa was stolen by an employee at the Louvre in Paris. 1968 - Dozens of people were killed in a massive military clampdown in Czechoslovakia. 1983 - Benigno Aquino, the Philippines opposition leader, was murdered just minutes after returning home from exile. 1986 - 1,700 people died when a cloud of lethal gas escaped from a volcanic lake, Lake Nyos, in Cameroon.

27th April 1124 – David I became King of Scotland. 1296 – The Scots were defeated by Edward I of England at the Battle of Dunbar. 1667 – The blind and impoverished John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10. 1773 – The Parliament of Great Britain passed the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the North American tea trade. They were not a Fair Trade company. 1791 - Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the Morse code, was born. 1840 – The foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, was laid. 1992 – Betty Boothroyd became the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history.

On the island of Foula, in the Shetlands, it is Christmas Day today. (Foula, located about sixteen miles from the west mainland of Shetland, is one of Great Britain’s most remote permanently inhabited islands. Way back, in 1752, they remained on the Julian calendar when the rest of the Kingdom of Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar. They even adhered to the Julian calendar by keeping 1800 as a leap year, but when they didn't observe a leap year in 1900, they ended up one day ahead of the Julian calendar and 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar. Confused?  You will be. This all means that they observe Christmas Day on 6th January, the day we all take down our decorations for 12th night (epiphany), and they celebrate New Year's Day on 13th January. Well, I guess it keeps Father Christmas busy.  Happy Christmas to the people of Foula. I will join in this evening with a glass of sherry, just to be polite.)

Keeping with the theme, according to Experian Marketing, 565,028 women in Britain are named Susan, which works out at 2.24 per cent of the female population. (Anne, Margaret, Sarah and Catherine close behind. The study was carried out as part of the Share a Coke campaign in the UK, whereby Coke bottles will feature 250 of the most popular names in Great Britain. Suffice to say Lynne doesn't feature, but that's okay, because I don't drink cola, I prefer beer. Now a "Share a beer campaign" that would be more like it.)

There are 12 net contributors and 15 net recipients within the EU. (Net contributors receive less money from EU funds than they pay into the joint coffers.  Net recipients receive more grants and benefits than they pay.  The largest net contributors include Germany (at 9 billion euros), France (6.4 billion), Italy (5.9 billion), Great Britain (5.6 billion) and the Netherlands (2.2 billion).  The leading net recipients are Poland (11 billion), Greece (4.6 billion), Hungary (4.4 billion), Spain (2.9 billion), and Portugal (2.9 billion).  Calculating that for each individual EU citizen, however, the picture looks different: Danes pay the most into EU coffers at 150 euros each, while Hungary receives the biggest payout - 442 euros per capita in aid money from Brussels.)