Pleading Guilty
Percentage of all criminal defendants in the United States who forgo a trial by pleading guilty: 97 Percentage of U.S. convicts exonerated last year who had previously pleaded guilty without a trial: 17
Read moreTag: facts
Great Art
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum is already home to an artist’s rendition of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” made from burned toast, and now comes a recent version by Laura Bell of Roscommon, MI — da Vinci’s masterpiece made with clothes-dryer lint. Bell said she did about 800 hours of laundry of various-colored towels to obtain lint of the […]
Read moreNot Becoming A Statistic
Trameka Pope has a lot to be proud of. The 19-year-old was homeless as a child and had a daughter right before she entered ninth grade, but next week she’ll graduate as valedictorian of Chicago’s Wendell Phillips Academy High School. The teen mom is a cheerleader and member of the National Honor Society, and in the fall she’ll attend Western […]
Read moreAverage American Income
The average American’s income declined almost 1 percent in 2014, to $64,432.The income of the poorest fifth of the population fell by 3.5 percent, to $9,818, while the income of the wealthiest fifth rose by nearly 1 percent, to $166,048.
Read moreExecutions in Saudi Arabia
88: Number of executions carried out in Saudi Arabia so far this year, already surpassing the total number in 2014; Amnesty International called the increase under Saudi’s new King Salman a “macabre spike”.
Read moreIt Was A Good Week For . . .
Knowing your limits, after Molly Schuyler, a 120-pound mother of four, won a Texas eating competition by wolfing down 13 pounds of steak in four minutes, 18 seconds. Schuyler said she had room for more steak but got sick of the taste.
Read moreThe Most Popular Names
The five most popular names for baby girls in 2014 were (in order) Emma, Olivia, Sophia, Isabella, and Ava, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration. For boys, the most popular were Noah, Liam, Mason, Jacob, and William.
Read moreMilitary Bases
The Department of Defense has 562,000 military bases and facilities located around the world, which collectively cover 24.7 million acres—nearly the size of Virginia. Much of that space is now unused, but Congress has barred the Pentagon from conducting a detailed assessment out of fear that bases in home districts would be closed.
Read moreOld gods, new temple
Neopagans in Iceland are erecting a temple dedicated to the Norse gods Thor, Odin, and Frigg for the first time in over 1,000 years. The temple will be built by the Asatru movement, which was founded in the 1970s to revive the ancient religion and now has more than 2,000 followers ina coutnry with just 320,000 people. Hilmar Orn Flilmarsson, Asatru’s […]
Read moreCannabis Selfie From Prison
A Polish prisoner triggered a crackdown on other inmates after he posted a photo of a large Cannabis plant that he’d grown in his cell. To boast about his green thumb, Dozy Zendarski took a selfie with the plant using a smuggled smartphone and posted it to Facebook. When it went viral, prison officials searched the entire jail and seized numerous phones and other banned items from […]
Read more