› added 8 years ago

77

TIL the FBI likely encouraged myths about Ma Barker being a criminal mastermind to justify shooting her during the shootout between the Barker-Karpis gang and the FBI. She likely never had any involvement in the gang’s crimes.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

8aLYK TIL that the Northern Royal Albatross take their first flight after about 8 months of age, and then spend the next 3-5 years at sea, never touching land during that time. Many then return to their headland where they born so they can then breed, having flown over 190,000km per year during that time.
p8nJN TIL A church choir had a practice session starting at 7:25pm one evening in 1950, and by 7:27pm the building exploded. No one was killed as they were all running late.
GY5X7 TIL Australian PM Gough Whitlam was removed by a British-American coup for abolishing royal patronage, moving Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, supporting “zones of peace”, opposing nuclear weapons testing, and threatening to close a CIA espionage base in Australia
W7NDo TIL that the Bengal famine of 1770 took place between 1769 and 1773 during which the British were ruling some territories in India. In the Bengal famine, around 10 million people died.
PYx6Z TIL magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin went to French controlled Algeria in 1856 to show the power of French magic. He lifted a metal box in front of a crowd, then had a warrior that he had made "as weak as a woman" try. Turning on electromagnets in the ground, he made the metal box unliftable.