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TIL Pope Leo X had a beloved pet elephant who died at the age of 6, with the Pope by his side, when they tried to treat his constipation with gold-enriched laxatives. The pope wrote a poem for him as an epitaph and Raphael made his portrait

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v1B4B TIL that In 2011, S.N.C.F., the French state railway company, apologized to victims of the Holocaust after lawmakers in the United States moved to block it from winning contracts there if the firm did not acknowledge its role in the shipping of Jews to death camps.
VBp6D TIL in the year 1840, 95 years before the founding of AA, there was a group called The Washingtonians who believed in the power of one alcoholic helping another alcoholic recover. At its peak, the group had more than 600,000 members but drifted from its primary purpose and entirely dissapeared.
g5MA TIL of Andrew Kehoe who committed the deadliest mass murder at a U.S. elementary school. May 18, 1927. It Included his wife, 6 adults and 37 children. In the aftermath, investigators found a wooden sign Kehoe had apparently wired to a fence on his farm that read, “Criminals are made, not born.”
kOLD4 TIL Anton LaVey's writings (author of "The Satanic Bible") were influenced by Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. L. Mencken, the members of the carnival with whom LaVey had supposedly worked in his youth, P. T. Barnum, Mark Twain, John Milton, and Lord Byron.
XEwv6 TIL that Some U.S. States Can Charge "Open Murder" Against a Person and Determine Later What "Degree" of Homicide They Wish to Press