History for January 30 - On-This-Day.com:
Anton Checkhov 1860, Franklin D. Roosevelt (U.S.) 1882, Dorothy Malone 1925
Gene Hackman 1931, Dick Cheney 1941 - U.S. Vice President for George W. Bush, Phil Collins 1951 - Singer, drummer (Genesis)
1847 - The town of Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco.
1862 - The U.S. Navy's first ironclad warship, the "Monitor", was launched.
1894 - C.B. King received a patent for the pneumatic hammer.
1933 - Adolf Hitler was named the German Chancellor.
1948 - Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu extremist.
1958 - Yves Saint Laurent, at age 22, held his first major fashion show in Paris.
1962 - Two members of the "Flying Wallendas" high-wire act were killed when their seven-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit, MI.
1979 - The civilian government of Iran announced it had decided to allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to return. He had been living in exile in France.
Transparency International released its 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking the world’s countries by levels of corruption, in January 2016. Why a “perceptions” index? According to the institute, it’s the best way:
“Corruption generally comprises illegal activities, which are deliberately hidden and only come to light through scandals, investigations or prosecutions. There is no meaningful way to assess absolute levels of corruption in countries or territories on the basis of hard empirical data. Possible attempts to do so, such as by comparing bribes reported, the number of prosecutions brought or studying court cases directly linked to corruption, cannot be taken as definitive indicators of corruption levels. Instead, they show how effective prosecutors, the courts or the media are in investigating and exposing corruption. Capturing perceptions of corruption of those in a position to offer assessments of public sector corruption is the most reliable method of comparing relative corruption levels across countries.”
With that in mind, here’s the map of the perception of corruption globally:
The top ten, least-corrupt countries are the following:
- Denmark
- Finland
- Sweden
- New Zealand
- Netherlands
- Norway
- Switzerland
- Singapore
- Canada
- Germany, Luxembourg, United Kingdom (3-way tie)
Since you’re probably curious, the United States ranks sixteenth in the world for the lowest perceived levels of corruption.