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TIL During World War II in 1940, Japan bombed Ningbo with ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague.

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eJWL TIL one of mathematician John von Neumann’s lecturers said “Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he’d come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper.”
kOMjW TIL the allies had plans to assassinate Hitler in 1944, but decided against it because they considered him to be less competent than anyone who might have replaced him (likely Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, or Goering). He made enough strategic mistakes that it was probably better to keep him around.
l0Rr TIL that Choco Pies are banned in North Korea because they were getting too popular, and Kim Jung-un feared they would cause an uprising. Because of this, South Korea packed many Choco Pies in balloons and sent them over the boarder to North Korea.
J1XKj TIL about the phenomena of polyandry or “wife-sharing” in Qing Dynasty China. Due to practices such female infanticide and concubinage there was an overall gender imbalance in society that poor husbands would exploit via renting their wives out to other, unmarried men for a fee.
nejpY TIL of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando in WWII. The lone survivor of an ambush, he survived an avalanche, severe frostbite and snow blindness, having to amputate his own toes, and being relentlessly pursued by Germans for nine weeks before being whisked to safety in Sweden by locals.