Interesting Facts

3rd August 2001 - A car bomb exploded in a busy west London street, injuring seven people. 2003 - The Anglican Church in America voted to approve the appointment of an openly gay bishop. 2008 - Nobel literature prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn who revealed the horror of Stalin's camps to the world, died aged 89.

Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to be awarded what is considered the most prestigious prize in math , the Fields medal. (Ms Mirzakhani has been a professor at Stanford University since 2008, but she is also the first person to win this medal from the Middle East, as she was born and raised in Iran. The Fields medal is considered to be the Nobel Prize for maths, because strangely there is no Nobel for mathematics. All 52 previous winners of the award were men.)

There is no chance of winning the top prize on a £2 scratch-card on sale in the UK. (Why can't you win?  Well because all the top £100,000 prizes have already been won. So you would think that they would be removed from sale, but according to Camelot, who run the lottery in the UK, the Gambling Commission says that retailers can continue to sell the stock they have activated for sale. About 12 million of the cards were printed with the odds of scooping the jackpot standing at almost 2.5 million-to-one, and now those odds are a big fat 0.)