posted 03-07-2004 11:33 AM            

Amount earmarked by the House last December to create an indoor rain forest in Iowa : $50,000,000 [Iowa Environmental/Educational Project (Des Moines) ]

Percentage by which Dick Gephardt's $460,000 overexpenditure exceeded the limits for Iowa's nomination caucus in 1988 : 60 [Federal Election Commission (Washington) ]

Ratio of 2004 Bush campaign donations from Merrill Lynch employees to those from Bechtel employees : 60:1 [Center for Responsive Politics (Washington) ]

Percentage margin by which a Milosevic-supported candidate won Serbia's presidential election last November : 12 [Centre for Free Elections and Democracy (Belgrade) ]

Percentage by which that election's turnout fell short of the threshold Serbia requires for lawful elections : 11 [Centre for Free Elections and Democracy (Belgrade) ]

Rank of Rwanda among countries with the largest proportion of women in their lower legislative house : 1 [Inter-Parliamentary Union (Geneva) ]

Rank of the death rate for women in childbirth in Afghanistan's Badakhshan region among the highest ever recorded : 1 [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta)/World Health Organization (Geneva) ]

Number of girls under age six in India for every boy : 0.93 [U.N. Population Fund (N.Y.C.) ]

Percentage of Japanese and Italian men, respectively, who rate their kisses a 9 or a 10 : 14, 72 [Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. (Toronto) ]

Minimum price a Russian company charges to provide an alibi for an adulterer's absence : $34 [Dmitry Petrov (Moscow) ]

Price a British company charges for its Purring Kitty software, which converts a mobile phone into a "discreet massager" : $2.65 [Vibelet (London) ]

Percentage of Chinese exports to the U.S. accounted for by merchandise sold at Wal-Mart : 10 [Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Ark.)/Department of Commerce (Washington) ]

Number of factory jobs that China has lost since 1995 : 25,000,000 [Alliance Capital Management Corporation (N.Y.C.) ]

Estimated percentage of the 2.9 million U.S. jobs lost since March 2001 that have not reappeared abroad : 83 [Forrester Research (Cambridge, Mass.)/Bureau of Labor Statistics (Washington) ]

Percentage of Mexicans who had a "bad" or "very bad" opinion of the United States in 2000 and 2003, respectively : 22, 58 [Latinobarometro (Santiago, Chile) ]

Rank of Costa Rica and the United States among countries whose citizens live longest : 18, 19 [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Washington) ]

Rank of the U.S. health-care system among the most efficient in the world, according to the World Health Organization : 37 [World Health Organization (Geneva) ]

Estimated value of Senate majority leader Bill Frist's household's stake in HCA, his family's hospital chain : $26,000,000 [Physicians for a National Health Program (Chicago) ]

Months before Bush signed the Medicare bill in December that the New York Times last mentioned Frist's holdings : 4 [Harper's research]

Amount Bill Gates has pledged to fight malaria through 2008, expressed as a percentage of USAID spending since 1998 : 86 [Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle)/U.S. Agency for International Development (Washington) ]

Percentage change between 2001 and 2002 in Saudi Arabia's PR spending in the United States : +1,700 [Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia (Washington) ]

Ratio of the number of bias crimes against Jews to those against Muslims reported in the U.S. in 2002 : 6:1 [Federal Bureau of Investigation (Washington) ]

Ratio of suicide bomb attacks carried out by Palestinians to those carried out by Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers since 1987 : 3:4 [Robert A. Pape, American Political Science Review (Washington) ]

Pounds of gear carried by a U.S. Special Operations soldier in Iraq : 135 [Harris Corporation (Rochester, N.Y.) ]

Percentage of this accounted for by disposable batteries : 26 [Harris Corporation (Rochester, N.Y.) ]

Calories of fuel energy used by U.S. farms in 1940 per calorie of food produced : 0.4 [The Land Institute (Salina, Kans.) ]

Calories of fuel energy used in 1974 per calorie of food produced : 1 [The Land Institute (Salina, Kans.) ]

Number of times a Hummer H2 could be driven around the world on the excess calories Americans consume each year : 244 [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta)/Food and Drug Administration (Rockville, Md.)/Harper's research ]

Percentage increase since 1999 in U.S. households in which there was hunger due to poverty during the year : 22 [U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service ]

Percentage by which health-care spending by an obese American exceeds that by an American of normal weight : 36 [Rand Corporation (Santa Monica, Calif.) ]

Percentage by which health-care spending by a daily smoker exceeds that by a nonsmoker : 21 [Rand Corporation (Santa Monica, Calif.) ]

Number of a Texas toddler's burned fingers amputated in 1992 after she was left in a car with her mother's lit cigarette : 9.5 [Philip Morris USA (Richmond) ]

Settlement Philip Morris paid the girl's family last May : $2,000,000 [Philip Morris USA (Richmond) ]

Percentage of lawsuits decided last year under the Americans with Disabilities Act that were won by employers : 94.5 [American Bar Association (Washington) ]

Number of disabled Californians whose home aid Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to eliminate : 65,000 [California State Department of Social Services (Sacramento) ]

Average number of years before reaching the White House that a twentieth-century U.S. president won his first elected post : 14 [Harper's research ]

Percentage points by which Ronald Reagan's approval rating changed in 1983 : +17 [The Gallup Organization (Princeton, N.J.) ]

Percentage points by which George W. Bush's rating changed last year : 0 [The Gallup Organization (Princeton, N.J.) ]

Percentage of the vote in last November's New Haven, Connecticut, mayoral race won by the Guilty Party candidate : 15 [Registrar of Voters (New Haven, Conn.) ]