With Take That singer Gary Barlow in hot water over tax avoidance, Tim Harford looks at the numbers to see if there's any truth in the post that's been doing the rounds on social media suggesting HMRC employs only 300 people to chase £70bn of tax evasion, while the DWP employs 3250 people to chase £1.2bn of benefits fraud?

Did the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty fall by half a few weeks ago?That's one interpretation of newly released figures for purchasing power parity around the world, but does it stack up? Should the World Bank be lowering its global poverty estimates?

Forget Conchita and the Polish milkmaids, the most exciting thing about Eurovision this year is that they've released more data than ever before! We crunch the numbers to find out what the results would have been if only the public had their say.

What are the chances of winning one of Willy Wonka's coveted 'Golden Tickets'? One More or Less listener's 9-year-old daughter wanted to know, so we sent Rob Eastaway to explain probability to her school class.

And Boris Johnson recently claimed there are 400,000 French people living in London. He also likes to say that he's the mayor of the 6th biggest French city on earth. But as we find out, the real numbers are rather less flattering to Boris's Gallic mayoral pretensions. Show less