Interesting Facts

8th May The General Election in the UK ends with a Conservative victory. The Tories are back, and there's gonna be trouble, hey na, hey na, the Tory's back.

7.5 million UK citizens who are eligible to vote are not yet registered for this year's (2015) General Election. (Changes to the voting system mean that many people are no longer on the electoral roll. This means that when they troll up to the polling station on May 7th, they will be turned away. They have till midnight tonight to get their skates on. It has to be said though; in the last General Election in 2010, out of 47 million voters, only 29.6 million bothered. Democracy in action? More like "Democracy inaction".)

20th April Is the last day you can register to vote in this year's General Election.

Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott is going to spend a week living in the Outback with Aboriginal clans. (As part of his pre-election promise to engage with Aboriginal society, Mr Abbott will spend the week listening to the concerns of Aboriginal elders. I hope he doesn't get lost this time. )

According to several newspaper reports and blog sites, the Tory party in the UK has deleted all the promises made before the election. (In what must have bee a frenzy of clicking "Del" all pre-election pledges have been removed from their website: Every article, speech and press release. And if you want to hear something even more sinister, they are using a “robot blocker” to ensure the documents are hidden from search engines and removed from the ‘Internet Archive’ an online library that aims to build up a permanent record of web content. A Conservative spokesman said: "We're making sure our website keeps the Conservative Party at the forefront of political campaigning. These changes allow people to quickly and easily access the most important information we provide..." Nice to see how they regard their promises. They went on to say that they are simply making it easier for people to “quickly and easily” access information on the site, but obviously only the...

You may have heard that a new pope has been elected. Surprisingly quickly as well. Especially when you consider that the longest papal conclave took over 2 years. (Deliberations started in 1268, when Catholic cardinals met in the village of Viterbo to elect a new Pope. Monsignor Charles Burns, a retired archivist at the Secret Vatican Archives, told ABC News in 2005 that the villagers grew angry at how long the process was taking (there was a split between French and Italian factions), and locked the cardinals in a nearby palace (the term "conclave" actually refers to this — it means "with a key"). In the end, the process went on for so long that the villagers tried to starve the cardinals into making a decision, giving them only bread and water. They even tore the roof off the palace in a bid to expose the cardinals to the elements — you can still see the roof-less palace today: They chose Italian born Teobaldo Visconti, a man who was neither a cardinal nor ev...

Seemingly Barack Obama is only the fifth President of the US to be re-elected with over 50% of the vote. (Of course that's only about 25% of the actual population of the US, because in spite of over $6 billion being spent on campaigning only an estimated 126 million Americans actually bothered to vote. That's an overall turnout rate of about 57.5%. )