Barometer

What Germans do worst Some things Germans aren't very good at: — Making reliable car engines. According to a survey by Warranty Direct last year, Audi came bottom, BMW seventh from bottom and Volkswagen ninth from bottom out of 36 manufacturers for engine failures. — Making love. According to a spurious website survey of 15,000 women in 2009, German men were the world's worst lovers, the main complaint being that they were 'smelly'. (Englishmen were second worst.) — Cricket. But they are not the worst. Germany lies between Ghana and Japan in division 8 of the ICC World Cricket League. This makes them the 42nd best team in the world, above France.

Green wings It was revealed that Pascal Husting, Greenpeace’s international programme director, commutes 250 miles by air from his home in Luxembourg to his office in Amsterdam several times a month. Some other eco-warriors who are keen on air travel: — Al Gore has run up 1 million air miles, the equivalent of more than 40 times around the Earth, in his campaign to save the planet, according to Wired magazine. — In 2009, Prince Charles hired a private Airbus A319 on a 2,200-mile tour to Europe to lecture on environmental issues, and his Duchy Originals brand ships spring water 6,000 miles to sell in the Gulf states.

The not-so-great charter David Cameron wants every child to be taught about Magna Carta. Some bits he might want to leave out: — ‘If one who has borrowed from the Jews any sum, great or small, die before that loan be repaid, the debt shall not bear interest while the heir is under age.’ — ‘No one shall be arrested or imprisoned upon the appeal of a woman, for the death of any other than her husband.’ Foul play Is there a correlation between bad behaviour from a country’s football team and violence in the country as a whole? WORST-BEHAVED TEAMS IN EUROPE Homicides per 100,000 people Ukraine 4.3 Romania 1.7 Croatia 1.2 Iceland 0.3 Bulgaria 1.

Parliamentary privilege Some facts and figures about the European Parliament, according to the parliament: — The parliament annually costs €3.10 per citizen in EU member states (compared with €7.30 for Westminster). — It received 1.4 million visitors over the past four years, with 790,400 visiting the Parliamentarium. And some facts from Single Seat, the campaign for the parliament to stop shuffling between Brussels and Strasbourg: — It costs an extra €180 million a year to have more than one seat. — The Strasbourg parliament building is empty 317 days a year. — Hotel prices in Strasbourg increase 150% when the parliament is in town. Raising the floor Ed Miliband has pledged to link the minimum wage to average earnings.

Memory holes The EU wants to introduce a law which would force Google to delete from its searches old information that individuals and organisations would prefer forgotten. Some things that come up when you write ‘EU’ and ‘scandal’ into Google: — A 2009 EU document advising officials to write two minutes of every meeting: a full one and a ‘neutral’ one, with the juicy bits taken out, in case it has to be released in a Freedom of Information request. — European Commission president José Manuel Barroso’s £24,600 hotel bill for a four-day stay in New York. — A former European commissioner’s appointment of her dentist as a highly paid adviser on HIV/Aids.

Animal spirit A labrador blown up with her handler while sniffing for bombs in Afghanistan in 2008 became the 64th animal to be awarded the PDSA's Dickin medal for 'gallantry' during wartime work. — Among the total are 29 dogs, yet they are outnumbered by the 32 pigeons who have won the medal, such as Gustav, for bringing home the first message from the Normandy beach landings in 1944. — Only three horses have been given the medal, and none of them were working in a war zone. Olga, for example, was given the award after bolting 100 yards from a flying bomb, before returning to the scene and helping police direct traffic and rescue operations. — One ship's cat has been given the medal, but there have been none for the cattle who have provided the bully beef.

Done a runner Mami Konneh Lahun, a 24-year-old athlete from Sierra Leone, went missing after finishing as the 20th-placed woman in the London Marathon. She is not the first athlete to have done a runner. — In the 2002 Commonwealth Games, 20 of her compatriots failed to return home. — After the London Olympics, 21 athletes went missing, including seven from Cameroon and three from Sudan. — The entire Eritrean football team failed to go home after a fixture in Kenya in 2009. — But the gold medal for asylum-seeking goes to 40 Nigerians who went missing after travelling to Britain in a stated attempt to qualify for the Open Golf Championship. Royal visits The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited New Zealand.

Escapology This week marked the 70th anniversary of the Great Escape, when 76 Allied servicemen tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III prisoner of war camp in Poland. Fifty of them were executed on recapture. How successful were escape attempts? — At least 483 Allied servicemen escaped German camps. Only 12 reached home turf, including three from the Great Escape. — The biggest breakout was of French servicemen from Oflag XVII-A in Austria in 1943: 132 escaped, two of whom made it out of German-controlled territory. — None of these figures include Horace Greasley, who claimed to have escaped from and returned to a camp in Lamsdorf, Germany, about 200 times to conduct an affair with a German-Jewish girl.

Plane vanished Some other planes, besides Flight MH370, which have disappeared without trace: — A Boeing 727 cargo plane that was being prepared for a flight in Luana, Angola, on 25 May 2003. It took off without permission and when last seen was headed south-westwards over the Atlantic. — An Antonov An-72 cargo plane with a crew of five on a flight from Port Bouet, Côte d’Ivoire to Rundu Airport, Namibia, on 22 December 1997. — A de Havilland Twin Otter operated by Merpati Nusantara Airlines with four crew and ten passengers on an internal Indonesian flight from Birma to Satartacik on 10 January 1995. Baby bills Does Britain have particularly expensive childcare?

The best places to open a brothel The Commons all-party group on prostitution has called for a Scandinavian-style law where selling sex would not be illegal but buying it would be. How does the world treat prostitution? — In a survey of 100 countries by the educational charity ProCon, 50 were judged to treat prostitution as illegal, 39 as legal, with the remaining 11 making it an offence in some instances. — Among the most liberal were Canada, where laws against brothel ownership and pimping were recently overturned by the supreme court, the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand and Greece. — The most severe criminal sanctions were found in Iran, where prostitutes face the death penalty, Iraq, Kenya and Saudi Arabia. You and whose army?

A kamikaze pilot at 80 The Japanese city of Minami-Kyushu was attacked for wanting to add the letters of 1,036 kamikaze pilots who died on suicide missions in the second world war to a UN archive. Not all kamikaze pilots died, and a few are still alive. — Shigeyoshi Hamazono, who is now in his eighties, achieved the unique distinction of surviving three kamikaze missions. — In the first two he developed technical problems with his plane and turned back. This did not lead to court-martial but to his being sent on a third mission. — On this occasion he was intercepted by US fighters before he could find his target. They holed his plane but failed to cause it to crash. Instead, Hamazono limped home. — The war ended before he could be sent on a fourth mission.