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TIL that when King Leopold II of Belgium personally acquired the "Congo Free State" in 1885, it was 76 times the size of Belgium. He claimed the land at the 1884-1885 Berlin conference promising to improve the lives of the locals but ended up enslaving them to gather ivory and natural rubber.

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b9MP9 TIL, that between 1937 and 1938 111,091 ethnic Poles living in USSR were executed as spies. To speed up the process local telephone books were used to find Polish sounding names. Another 28,744 were sent to Gulags.
WJ9A TIL: In the Dr. Seuss movie “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T”, one of the 150 boys vomited on the piano while filming. This caused a chain reaction resulting in 150 vomiting boys. Dr. Seuss said that the film’s reviews were similar.
QNZn6 TIL about the "Law of Triviality" which states that individuals give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.
rRxoW TIL Australians developed Vegemite because they couldn't wait for Marmite supplies to resume after World War I.
7jBO TIL dodo birds were not dumb but friendly to people, and that is what led to their demise.