Louvre incursion
Jewellery once belonging to Napoleon’s family was sprung from the Louvre. In 1911 the ‘Mona Lisa’ was stolen by an Italian glazier, Vincenzo Peruggia, who worked there and who managed to slip the painting under his smock. Two years later he was caught when trying to sell it to an antiques dealer in Florence for half a million lire (€2.4 million in today’s money). He spent seven months in jail.
Rough sleepers
Which council areas had the largest number of rough sleepers in 2024?
Westminster 388
Camden 132
City of London 86
Somerset 80
Bristol 77
Brighton and Hove 76
Eight council areas had no rough sleepers: East Hampshire, Isles of Scilly, Mid Suffolk, Oadby and Wigston, Rochford, Rossendale, Staffordshire Moorlands and Uttlesford.
Kent and won’t
The Reform UK leader of Kent County Council went back on the party’s promise to cut council tax, agreeing that spending was ‘already down to the bare bones’. What does the council spend its money on?
Adults and older people 35%
Children’s social care 13%
Children’s other services 12%
Transport (excluding roads) 6%
Management, support services,
overheads 6%
Borrowing and other corporate costs 6%
Schools and high needs 6%
Waste (as in rubbish) 4%
Public health 4%
Roads 2%
Embedded in the above figures are staff salaries, 44 of whom are paid more than £100,000, and 8 over £150,000.
Outrageous outages
A fault in Amazon’s web-hosting service led to more of 1,000 websites crashing. Some of history’s biggest internet outages:
— 8.5m devices were affected on 19 July 2024 when a faulty security update affected users of Microsoft Windows.
– Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for seven hours on 4 October 2021 when an error was introduced into Meta’s systems during routine maintenance.
– Google, Gmail and YouTube went down for 47 minutes on 14 December 2020 when Google was switching quota systems.
– Most of the biggest internet outages to date have been caused by cock-up rather than deliberate cyber attack.
Comments