8/02Number of names of U.S. peace and civil-rights activists in the CIA’s Operation CHAOS database in 1973: 300,000
8/02Number of U.S. residents in 1954 that the FBI had slated for roundup in the event of a national emergency: 26,000
8/02Percentage of Washington, D.C., murder cases opened last year that remained unsolved by year’s end: 66
8/02Chance that an American filing for bankruptcy last year did so because of medical expenses: 1 in 2
8/02Percentage change last year in the total profits of Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies: +35
Percentage change in the total profits of all Fortune 500 companies: -54
8/02Year in which the prom of Georgia’s Taylor County public high school was first integrated: 2002
8/02Average amount by which the price a black American pays for a new car exceeds that paid by a white for the same model: $420
8/02Extra amount Oregon charges per year to register a hybrid gas/electric car in compensation for lost gasoline taxes: $15
8/02Number of round-trips to the sun represented by the world’s outstanding frequent-flyer miles: 42,500
8/02Projected percentage by which melting Arctic ice will shorten shipping routes between Europe and East Asia by 2020: 33
8/02Ratio of the amount of water Americans use in the shower each year to the amount wasted in leaks nationwide: 6:5
8/02Amount a Spanish inventor charges per month to lease a front-loading 37-nozzle pet-washing machine: $600
8/02Price a Las Vegas filmmaker charges through his website for a film of homeless men fighting each other: $19.95
8/02Minimum spending on refreshments required per luxury box at this year’s U.S. Open tennis tournament: $24,000
8/02Number of students at Illinois’s Aurora University who have earned academic credit for a course in “business golf”: 29
8/02Amount an Ohio power company agreed to pay in April to purchase a town affected by its plant’s pollution: $20,000,000
8/02Amount the Bush Administration paid this year to buy back oil and gas drilling leases off Florida’s coast: $115,000,000
Factor by which this exceeds the price that the Reagan Administration received for selling them: 7
Months before the Florida gubernatorial election this year that President Bush announced the buyback: 5
8/02Days that a U.S. soldier was investigated in May for calling Bush”a joke” in a letter to a newspaper: 10
8/02Number of months in jail to which one can be sentenced for discussing politics without a permit in Zimbabwe: 6
8/02Number of northern Nigerian states in which being divorced and pregnant is enough evidence for an adultery conviction: 12
8/02Years that a Nigerian woman appealing a sentence of death by stoning in March will be allowed to live to wean her baby: 1.5
8/02Percentage of Afghans who will “soon” get AIDS if adulterous women are not jailed, according to a government deputy: 50
8/02Number of nations besides Somalia and the United States that have yet to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child: 0
8/02Chance an American knows that more Palestinians than Israelis have died in political violence since 2000: 1 in 3
8/02Number of fatalities sustained by the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon during its 24 years there: 239
8/02Number of countries in which at least one U.S. soldier was stationed last year and in 1950, respectively: 148, 95
8/02Estimated number of survivors of the 1945 U.S. atomic bomb attacks in Japan now living in the United States: 1,000
8/02Ratio of words the New York Times devoted to Stephen Jay Gould’s obituary to those it spent on John Gotti’s: 4:7
8/02Years before the death of Britain’s Queen Mother in March that the Times of London first wrote her obituary: 64
8/02Last year in which South Africa’s average life expectancy was as low as it is today: 1955
8/02Number of Argentines who belong to at least one of their country’s 5,000 bartering clubs: 2,500,000