› added 7 years ago

168

TIL that Japanese, South Koreans and Taiwanese were considered ‘honorary whites’ by the Apartheid-Era South African government and were granted most of the rights usually reserved for white citizens

Read more wikipedia.org

via ift.tt

0w4WN TIL that in 1914 Capt Campbell, a British POW held in Germany, asked permission from Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit his dying mother in England. The Kaiser agreed, on the condition that Campbell return to the camp, which he did - and remained there until the war ended in 1918.
XVbR TIL Meredith Gardner, a codebreaker was able to work out that more than 200 American citizens were Soviet agents between 1930 and 1945. One of the spies was William Weisband, who was one of Gardner colleagues on the project, and had told the Soviets as soon as the code was broken.
n80Y TIL only one white man has ever run 100 meters in under 10 seconds. The other 75 men who have done it were all black.
XE7yR TIL there's a very large, clumsy, and flightless species of ground-dwelling Parrot in New Zealand called the Kakapo. Critically endangered, these turkey-sized, incredibly friendly and hopeless birds are mostly uninterested in mating, have no practical defenses, and often forget that they cannot fly.
8ex6a TIL a flashback scene in the cult favourite sci-fi horror Event Horizon was much longer, used pornstars as the cast, would be illegal to shoot today, was stripped from the movie by the producers and is considered lost because it was not archived for later use in a Director's Cut