Hard Numbers

1,200: How do you keep military officers loyal to your government? Promote them. In 2002 there were seventy generals in Venezuela. Now there are 1,200, according to Venezuelan journalist Miguel Henrique Otero.

27: A January survey for NOI, Nigeria’s largest pollster saw President Muhammadu Buhari’s approval rating slide to 40%, the lowest on record and a 27-point drop since last July. This poll was taken before Boko Haram’s abduction of the Dapchi girls.

2: The leaders of two of the top three parties in Italy are disqualified from taking public office after Sunday’s election because of criminal convictions.

500: Since May 2017, Egypt has blocked about 500 news websites, including HuffPost Arabi and the country’s few remaining independent news websites.

49,780,000: The United States Citizen and Immigration Services has taken the words “nation of immigrants” out of its mission statement. That doesn’t change this basic fact: The US has more immigrants than any other country in the world, with 49,780,000 people living in the US who were born in other countries.

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