How have Eurostar passenger numbers changed?

Made to run

A robot at the Robotic Olympiad in Beijing bettered Usain Bolt’s 100 metres record by 0.19 seconds.

– It has taken a century, however, for reality to catch up with fiction. The term ‘robot’ comes from a play, R.U.R., written by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The title stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots, a company which manufactured machines to replace humans in factory production. It was derived from Robotnik, a Czech term from a slave or drudge.

Channel passengers

Virgin Trains won permission from the Office of Rail and Road to run up to 20 services through the Channel Tunnel, taking on the current monopoly operator Eurostar. How have Eurostar passengers numbers changed over the years?

— Before the Channel Tunnel opened, London and Continental Railways predicted that it would see 21.4m passengers a year by 2004.

– In 1995, its first full year of operation, Eurostar carried 3m passengers. That rose to 7m in 2000 but fell back to 6.3m in 2003. In 2004, after the partial opening of the high-speed link through Kent, that increased to 7.3m and carried on rising to reach 11m in 2018 and 2019. By 2023, it had not yet recovered from Covid, carrying 10.7m passengers.

– For 2025, Eurostar claimed 20m passengers. However, this includes services it took over from Thalys, which ran trains between Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, as well as trains through the Channel Tunnel.

Cousin marriage

A Sudanese migrant won the right to remain in Britain on the strength of her marriage to her first cousin (a practice which remains legal in Britain). Which countries are estimated to have the highest and lowest rates of consanguineous marriages (anything closer than second cousins) in the world? % of all marriages

highest

Pakistan 61.2%

Kuwait 54.3%

Qatar 54.0%

UAE 50.5%

Sudan 50%

lowest

Czech Republic, Netherlands, Slovakia, Sweden, Peru, US 0.1%

Australia, Belgium 0.2%

Argentina 0.4%

Hungary 0.5%

The UK is estimated to have a rate of 1.1%.