by Diana Filer
- The Great Wall of China at 21,196km is still the world’s longest wall. But the Dingo Fence in Australia, built to keep rabbits and dingoes away from crops, is the longest ‘fence’, at 5,614km.
- A skep is a beehive, especially one with a dome made of twisted straw.
- Hocus pocus is a magical formula utterance for a trick, a sleight of hand, sometimes with an assumed derivation of the Latin phrase, ‘hoc est corpus’, a corruption of the Catholic liturgy ‘hoc est enim meum corpus’: ‘here is my body’.Rayb
- Montreal MP David Lametti is Canada’s new Minister of Justice, while former minister Jody Wilson-Raybould has shifted to Veterans’ Affairs.
- The Republic of Upper Volta in 1984 became ‘Burkina Faso’, which in English means ‘land of the upright honest people’.
