Interesting Facts

30th January 1948 - Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by an extremist. 1933 - Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

The game Cluedo, was originally called "Murder!" (The name was changed to Cluedo when the inventor prese nted the game to  Waddingtons 's  who changed it to its current trademark name of "Cluedo", a nice little word play on "clue" and " Ludo ";  ludo  is  Latin  for  I play .  Much more civilised than, muder.)

Honduras has the world's highest murder rate. (The National Commission for Human Rights has calculated that there is a violent death every 74 minutes in this small nation of about eight million people, and in 2011 they recorded the highest murder rate in the world, with 86 people killed for every 100,000 inhabitants. In  Mexico the rate is 18, in the UK it is just over 1. What fuels the violence in Honduras, and in Mexico? Illegal drugs. So, if you take / deal / transport or make money from this stuff, you are part of the problem.)

There have been 92 deaths in Eastenders since it began in 1985. (This doesn't seem too farfetched, but 22.8% of the deaths were murder, a rate far above Britain's real figure of 0.032 per cent, and there is going to be yet another one soon. There is even a death map on the BBC:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/eastenders/games/death_map/ Cheerful stuff. )

Being a monarch up to 1800 was more risky business than being a soldier engaged in a contemporary war. (According to "Killing Kings", a paper that will appear on the website of the British Journal of Criminology on Monday 31 January, a statistical study of the demise of 1,513 monarchs in 45 European monarchies over the period 600 to 1800 revealed that almost a quarter (22 per cent) of all royal deaths were bloody - accidents, battle deaths and killings - and that 15 per cent of all deaths were outright murder. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.) Thanks to Alex

A rather macabre map of London has been put online. Using web application Google Maps it plots more than 400 homicide cases, based on news agency Central News' court reports and the Old Bailey's archives. (From the evil doer, Jack the Ripper to the nast, notorious Krays the owners of the site plan to map every London murder case since the 19th century. This gruesome piece of social history can be found at murdermap.co.uk.)