› added 1 year ago

55

TIL that Christine Maggiore, founder of the HIV/AIDS denialist group Alive and Well, died of AIDS in 2008.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

R7054 TIL about Witold Pilecki, a polish intelligence agent in WW2 who volunteered to join a resistance operation to infiltrate a Nazi Death Camp and gather intelligence about the Nazi's crimes and inform Western Allies. Then, after two and a half years, he chose to escape. The camp was Auschwitz.
b9Y09 TIL before becoming an iconic thriller, Stephen King's first novel "Carrie" was rejected by 30 publishers, causing him to give up and throw it in the trash. His wife retrieved it and urged him to resubmit it.
jlvR TIL Pedro, the son of King Afonso IV of Portugal, was forbidden by the king to marry the woman he loved. King Afonso had her murdered to keep them apart. When Pedro became king, he hunted down her assassins and had their hearts torn out, symbolic of what they had done to him
4XY0g TIL for much of the 1800s in the UK, Sunday and Monday were the unofficial weekend, with Sunday for Church and Monday being adopted by workers as an unofficial holiday, mockingly called "St. Monday" (like a religious holiday). By the late 1800s, Monday became a workday, and Saturday a half workday.
L4Ym TIL a 13-year-old Canadian girl once ran the fastest marathon by a female, knocking more than four minutes off the previous world record. While running she was beaming and saying, “gee, this is great!“ Two minutes after the race, a doctor declared that her heart rate had already returned to normal.