4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Is 2016 an unusually deadly year for terrorism?
In a joint investigation with BBC Newsbeat and BBC Monitoring, we’ve analysed nearly 25,000 news articles to assess whether 2016 so far has been a unusually deadly year for terrorism. It certainly feels like it. But what do the numbers say? We estimate that, between January and July this year, 892 people died in terrorist attacks in Europe – making it the most deadly first seven months of a year since 1994. But the vast majority of those deaths have been in Turkey. The number for Western Europe is 143, which is lower than many years in the 1970s.
Dying ‘at the hands of the police’
This week retired footballer Dalian Atkinson died after being 'tasered' by police. His death has renewed concerns about the number of people who die after coming into contact with the police. Recently it was claimed that one person a week dies ‘at the hands of the police’ and that ‘black people are disproportionately affected.’ We take a look at the numbers.
Olympic predictions
As the Games in Rio draw to an end, we look back at the medal predictions we made before they started. Which countries have performed as expected? And which failed to meet our expectations?
The cost of a wedding gift
Can economics tell us how much to spend on a wedding gift? Our reporter Jordan is in a tight spot. He’s heading to an old friend’s wedding and needs to figure out how little he can get away with spending on a gift. Luckily, economist Maria Kozlovskaya is on hand to explain her findings on our ‘internal exchange rate’ for gift giving. Can she preserve Jordan’s friendship while protecting his wallet?
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0:00.0 | Hello, this is Tim Harford. This is the longer Radio 4 edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the 19th of August. |
0:09.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. |
0:14.8 | This week we will be using economics to help someone decide how much to spend on a wedding gift. |
0:20.1 | We will ask what's really going on with deaths at the hands of the police. |
0:23.6 | There's the more or less desk of good news of course, |
0:26.2 | and we will revisit our Olympic medal predictions. |
0:29.2 | How are they shaping up? |
0:30.4 | But first... |
0:32.4 | A terror attack in Brussels. The city is rocked by explosions at the airport and the metro. |
0:38.0 | Terror at a shopping mall in Munich. |
0:41.0 | Police are hunting for three gunmen. |
0:43.0 | 84 people are dead and many injured after a terror attack in southern France. |
0:49.0 | These appalling attacks are fresh in the memory, but we wanted to get a sense of the longer historical view. |
0:56.0 | Has 2016 been a particularly bad year for terrorist attacks or does it just feel that way? |
1:02.0 | Well, our reporter Simon Mabin has been on the case |
1:04.8 | what have you found Simon? Well we've been working with colleagues from Radio 1 Newsbeat |
1:08.9 | and BBC monitoring to try to count the terrorism deaths in Europe in 2016. |
1:14.0 | So compare them with the historical record, |
1:16.0 | we've used the University of Maryland's global terrorism database. |
1:20.0 | It's the most comprehensive set of terrorism data out there. |
1:23.2 | But it's not as simple as just counting the number of deaths. |
1:26.7 | Both we and the global terrorism database |
... |
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