Oddly specific

This Daily Mail article about a young child abandoned by her drunken parents states that "Police found her parents 109 yards away...".

That is a very specific distance, and makes me wonder if the Portuguese police got out a measuring tape to make sure that their facts were absolutely correct. Of course, it could be that they just estimated the distance, and being European, used the metric system. So, they reckoned it was about 100 metres, which is, of course, 109.36133 yards. The Daily Mail took this conversion literally, although to be fair, they did round it down. (109 yards and one foot would have been even better, though.)

Daily Mail claims smoking will kill more people than live in the UK

They've gone too far. We know how much they love cancer scare stories, but this is ridiculous. For this Daily Mail story today, the headline claims that smoking will claim a hundred million lives in the UK. That's more than the actual population of the UK. The first paragraph of the story clarifies the situation. The Royal College of Physicians has said that 100 million years of life will be lost - averaging out at 10 years per smoker.

Even a cursory read of the story, or an ounce of common sense, should have pointed out that this headline is somewhat wide of the mark.