› added 11 months ago

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TIL that Celine Dion represented Switzerland in the 1988 Eurovision Contest and won, even through she was a French-Canadian.

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EgVg7 TIL the second Rashidun caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, a senior companion and father-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, was assassinated by a Persian slave in 644 who stabbed him with a double-bladed dagger, apparently due to Umar's refusal to lift a daily tax imposed on the slave by his slave master.
R5vr4 TIL The Battle of the Somme was humouristically called the "Great Fuck Up" by soldiers of WW1
J1AeB TIL The US comic strip "Dennis the Menace" was released on the same day, on 12 March 1951, as the UK comic strip "Dennis the Menace". The comics are completely unrelated to each other apart from sharing the same name and release date.
b7pj TIL that until 1936, Liechtenstein and Haiti were unknowingly using the same flag, and they didn’t find out until they competed against each other in the Olympics
8yeX TIL of Project COLDFEET, a 1962 operation where two CIA operatives were airdropped onto an abandoned Soviet research station on an ice floe, retrieved information on advanced submarine detection systems, and were extracted via the Fulton Skyhook recovery system to a modified B-17.