Interesting Facts

20th August 1858 – Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's same theory. 1882 – Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture debuted in Moscow. 1940 – Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded with an ice axe by Ramon Mercader in Mexico. 1978 - A 29 year old airline stewardess, Irit Gidron, died during an attack on a bus carrying Israelis in central London. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) later said it had carried out the attack. 1986 – U.S. Postal employee Patrick Sherrill gunned down 14 of his co-workers and then commited suicide in In Edmond, Oklahoma. 1988 – A cease-fire was agreed between Iran and Iraq, after almost eight years of war. 1989 – The pleasure boat Marchioness sank on the River Thames, in London, following a collision. 51 people were killed. 1991 – Estonia seceded from the Soviet Union.

28th June 1922 - 18 year old Ralph Samuelson slapped a pair of sticks on his feet, grabbed hold of a rope behind a boat, and became the world's first waterskier. (His brother Ben operated the powerboat that pulled Ralph along. He broke the original skis in one landing, but his slightly-modified second pair still can be seen at the Water Ski Hall of Fame museum in Winter Haven, Florida.) 1960 - 45 men were killed in a gas explosion at a coal mine in Monmouthshire, Wales. 2004 - The United States handed power back to the Iraqi people at a low-key ceremony in Baghdad.

The Chilcot report into the Iraq war cost £10,375,000.00. It consists of 12-volumes containing 2.6 million words. (The inquiry was launched on 30 July 2009, to cover the period of 2001 to the end of July 2009.  Over 100 witnesses were called. The findings of the report were that British military action was not the last resort, that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence that was never challenged, and that the overall severity of the threat posed by Iraq, particularly the existence of weapons of mass destruction, was grossly overstated, and presented with a certainty that was not justified.) The whole report can be downloaded here: http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/

Iraq, Rwanda and Mexico each have more female MPs than Britain. (There are currently 146 female MPs in parliament in Britain, but given that there are 650 seats, this is only 22.5%. In Iraq the percentage is 25.2%, in Mexico 36.8% and Rwanda has the highest percentage of women MPs in the world, at 56.3%. You can check your country here:- http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm )

16-year-old Mohamed Altoumaimi, an Iraqi immigrant living in central Sweden, has written a formula to explain a number of complex relationships dealing with Bernoulli numbers. (Mohamed, who moved with his family to Sweden six years ago, figured out the Bernoulli sequence of rational numbers, something that is normally reserved for much more seasoned mathematicians.)