Barometer

Bishops and rioters From the Scarman report to ‘Faith in the City’, no British riot is complete without politicians and churchmen weighing in with the answers. It was no different in the 13th century. In 1272 the townsmen of Norwich rioted after the prior to the city’s monastery refused to allow the arrest of monastic servants charged with murder. The cathedral was burned down. In response, the bishop excommunicated the townsfolk, but two years later the Pope was asked to pass judgment. He deferred to Edward I, who besides ordering the townsmen to pay 3,000 marks towards rebuilding the cathedral, produced an agreement with a phrase worthy of a primary school headmistress: ‘That all parties should be real friends.

Select company The appearance of Rupert Murdoch before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee confirmed that some of the best action in parliament is now before select committees, not in the chamber. — Select committees were around in the 18th century, when they were convened for particular purposes. An early one, in 1763, examined ‘the state of private madhouses’. They fell into disuse in the 20th century, when their work was taken over by inquiries made up of non-MPs. — The idea of permanent committees of MPs to examine the work of the government dates from 1966, when Richard Crossman, then leader of the House of Commons, set up two: one into agriculture and one into science and technology.

Achieving closure The News of the World has shut after 168 years, joining a long list of defunct British newspapers. Here are some of the more notable ones: Daily Herald Started in 1911 as a strike news sheet by the London Society of Compositors. Taken over by the TUC in 1922, in the 1930s it was briefly the world’s best-selling newspaper. Reborn as the Sun in 1964. Daily Sketch Founded in Manchester in 1909 by Sir Edward Hulton and bought in 1920 by Lord Rothermere. Merged with the Daily Graphic in 1946, re-emerging in 1953, when the Graphic renamed itself the Sketch. Merged with Daily Mail in 1971. Sunday Dispatch Founded in 1801, and bought by Lord Rothermere in 1903. Once the bestselling Sunday title, it failed to survive the television age, closing in 1961.

Victory celebrations Novak Djokovic celebrated winning the men’s singles at Wimbledon by eating grass on the Centre Court. While not doing a lot to boost the image of his native Serbia as a modern country, the act joins a litany of bizarre victory celebrations. — After winning a 100 metres race in 2004, Maurice Greene started leaping about in apparent pain before taking off his boots and having an official spray them with a fire extinguisher. — The Barcelona football team celebrated winning this year’s Champions League final at Wembley by cutting the net from one of the goalposts.

Life of Pi A group of mathematicians is campaigning for the mathematical constant pi to be replaced by tau, the latter being the ratio of the circumference to the radius as opposed to that of the circumference to the diameter. As tau is simply twice the value of pi (approximately 6.28) it won’t consume so many centuries to establish its value as pi. — A value for pi is mentioned in the Old Testament relating to the construction of the Temple of Solomon around 450 bc. It sets a value of three, suggesting that the temple may have been very shoddily built. — In the 3rd century bc, Archimedes calculated the value of pi to lie somewhere between 223/71 and 22/7, which is correct to three decimal places.

Phreaks and geeks Police arrested a 19-year-old man suspected of hacking into the government computers containing data from the entire 2011 census. — Hacking evolved in the 1960s from phone ‘phreaking’, manipulating telecom systems to gain free calls. In 1972, one John T. Draper succeeded in accessing US telecoms systems by transmitting a 2600 hertz tone down the wires, obtained from a whistle given away with breakfast cereal. He was caught and put on probation. — The first hacker convicted (for theft), was Ian Murphy, who in 1981 changed clocks in US phone company computers to make daytime calls on a late-night tariff. Pirate gold Three Britons were sentenced to 15 years in Somalia for the illegal import of £2.

Council housing Ed Miliband proposed that a Labour government under his leadership would send people in employment to the top of the council house waiting list. Mr Miliband risks criticism by his own party, which has already attacked similar plans by the Tory-controlled Westminster Council. How would Mr Miliband’s policy have gone down with the architect of Labour’s post-war housing policy, Nye Bevan? —Bevan always intended council housing to be a choice of the middle classes as well as the working classes, saying he wanted to create a ‘living tapestry’ where ‘the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the labourer all lived on the same street’.

A better class of tourist — The Seychelles tourism industry received a boost with the announcement that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to spend their honeymoon there. — Like many island states in the tropics, tourism is a huge part of the economy: just over half the country’s GDP and 70 per cent of its foreign currency earnings. When 12 dead sharks were discovered on a tourist fishing trip in 2006 it was a national crisis. — Yet the Duke and Duchess won’t have to share the beaches with too many grockles: hotel beds have been limited to 5,000, and annual tourist numbers have been capped at 150,000 a year, less than double what they were at the end of the 1970s. Coalition terms The coalition celebrated its first birthday.

Rules of engagement The strike on bin Laden has been widely celebrated in the US, even though there are strong grounds to regard it as illegal. — Section 5(g) of Executive Order 11905 signed by Gerald Ford in 1976 states ‘No employee of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in political assassination’. — The order was reiterated by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, although the latter bombed Gaddafi’s compound in 1986. — US special forces could have been justified, however, if their intention had been to arrest bin Laden and then were forced to fire in self-defence. Money migrations The National Institute for Economic and Social Research calculated that migrant workers from Eastern Europe have added 0.

Easter day The late date of Easter this year has rekindled one of Britain’s lengthiest political debates: the implementation, or rather non-implementation, of the Easter Act 1928. The act was to fix the date of Easter on the Sunday following the second Saturday in April — meaning that it would wander between 9 and 15 April rather than between 22 March and 25 April. — The act demanded that before it could be implemented ‘regard shall be had to any opinion officially expressed’ by a Christian church. That has been the stumbling block. In 1966 the Church Assembly of the Church of England passed a motion in favour. The Catholic Church in Britain also approved. But the Orthodox Church, which has a different date for Easter as it is, did not.

Prince of cars It was revealed that Audi has been enticing royal customers with 60 per cent discounts. It is not the first car company to target royalty to build its image. — In 1898 the Daimler Motor Company of Coventry offered the Prince of Wales the use of five cars on a visit to Warwick Castle. — The generosity was richly rewarded: in 1902, as King Edward VII, he ordered a 22 HP model from the company and bestowed a royal warrant. — Daimler remained the sole supplier of vehicles to the Royal Family until 1949 when, after a gearbox failure in a Daimler given to him as a wedding present, Prince Philip ordered a Rolls-Royce instead. Behind the veil A ban on wearing burqas came into effect in France.

Intern affairs — Nick Clegg called for internships to be made available to students from poor backgrounds, although it was then revealed that the young Clegg was himself parachuted into an internship at a bank thanks to a phone call from his dad. — The word ‘internship’ first entered public consciousness in Britain after the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998: she was a White House intern who ended up in unexpectedly close contact with the president, Bill Clinton. — Internships can be first traced to the US in 1879. But the concept is French: the word is derived from ‘interne’, an assistant doctor. The world behind bars The number of foreign nationals arrested in Britain has doubled in the past two years.

Flowering wilderness A Bangor university study has claimed that Antarctica has become greener as the climate in the Western Peninsula has warmed. While most of Antarctica is under permanent snow and ice, one per cent of the continent’s surface area is warm enough in the summer for the snow to melt and expose two species of flowering plant, Antarctic hairgrass and Antarctic pearlwort. However, lichens are found closer to the interior of the continent. The world’s most southerly plant is a lichen found at 86 degrees south, about 260 miles from the South Pole. The most northerly is an arctic willow found at 83 degrees north, around 450 miles from the North Pole. Once bitten… Natural England proposes repopulating parts of the country with adders.

Night shift The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, says the corporation may cut the £150 million a year it spends on night-time programming, with the ‘theoretical possibility’ that insomniac viewers might be left with a black screen. — Although it is now taken for granted, 24-hour television is a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until 1972 that daytime ITV viewers could be sure of anything to watch, while BBC2 used to go off-air in the daytime until 1986. In the same year Yorkshire television became the first terrestrial station to offer night-time viewing, which consisted of music videos. — BBC1 continued to send viewers to bed with a ‘closedown’ ceremony involving the national anthem until 8 November 1997.