› added 13 years ago

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TIL Iran contracted a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate a Saudi diplomat while in Washington, D.C. The plot was only foiled because the assassin was an informant for the DEA in the War on Drugs.

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0dYLp TIL: A cloud weighs about a million tonnes. A typical cumulus cloud has a volume of around one cubic kilometer, and even though its density is slightly lower than the surrounding air, the sheer volume results in a mass that can exceed a million tonnes.
d8O8j TIL as part of Ben Franklin's will, the cities of Boston and Philadelphia both received 1000 pounds sterling with the will requiring a portion of the money be set aside for 200 years. When this portion was finally accessed it was worth several million dollars.
Me6n7 TIL About Africville, the black community of Halifax that was purposefully neglected by the city in an effort to make it un-livable. Halifax denied sewage, roads, and other services, even creating a toxic waste dump nearby, eventually Halifax bulldozed the community with people still in their houses
vPkmB TIL that 'Rosamond', an early attempt at English opera, was so poorly received that it effectively killed English-language opera for nearly thirty years, until it was set to new music.
BrPEk TIL that there's a historical period officially referred to as the Pornocracy. 904 AD-906 AD was a super corrupt time for the Papacy and later scholars called it the Pornocracy, the Hetaerocracy, or the Rule of Harlots. (The Catholic Church refers to it as the saeculum obscurum, or dark century.)