120: Record homicide levels have sapped some $120 billion from Brazil’s economy since the mid-1990s, according to a government report released this week. To put that in perspective, that’s almost equal to what the US spent on the Marshall Plan to revive Western Europe after World War Two.
66: A staggering 66 percent of Russians say they expect their team to win the World Cup this year, despite the fact that the odds are 50–1 against the home team. But the disappointment won’t be too widespread: only 15 percent of Russians say they’ll even watch the event closely either way.
40: Close to 40 percent of multinational firms’ profits are shifted away from their countries of residency into low-tax havens each year. That’s a huge amount of revenue that national governments aren’t getting to spend on their people, and it’s one of the reasons for the backlash against “globalism.”
29: Members of the security personnel of Swaziland’s King Mswati III have been fined 29 cattle after pictures of his multi-million-dollar private jet appeared on social media. In a country where two-thirds of the population lives in poverty, that’s a bad leak with a big bovine cost.
3/4: Nearly three-quarters of South Korean businesses say they would be willing to invest in the North if international sanctions on Pyongyang are lifted. One European company is already looking to outsource its technology there — well, we know that North Korea has world class hack- . . . er, we mean programming capabilities.
