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TIL Jackie Chan’s Dad Was a Spy Who Met His Opium-Dealing Mom During an Arrest

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GY51E TIL about Gareth Jones, the Welsh reporter who broke the Holodomor story - Russia's secret mass starvation of at least 3.5 million Ukrainians. He was murdered one day before his 30th birthday, most likely by the Soviet NKVD as retaliation for embarrassing the regime.
1aDLX TIL when skyscrapers were still in its infancy, a stunt performance called "the Human Fly" became extremely popular across North America, which was when someone (usually with a blindfold) would scale/climb the building without a net, becoming the influence for "wall-crawler" Spider-Man decades later
rKYe TIL the original height of Mount Everest “was calculated to be exactly 29,000 ft (8,839.2 m) high, but was publicly declared to be 29,002 ft (8,839.8 m) in order to avoid the impression that an exact height of 29,000 feet (8,839.2 m) was nothing more than a rounded estimate.”
v1rGB TIL when Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, he ended the lives of 1.7 million Imperial personnel, and 250,000 civilians (mostly contractors, prisoners and catering staff.)
6JkZ TIL that James May of Top Gear/Grand Tour fame not only bested Gordon Ramsay in a ‘test of man’ competition (which ended with the two eating rotten shark) but beat him in culinary competition while drunk on white wine.