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TIL that the 1984 Summer Olympics, which took place in Los Angeles, made a profit

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9opp TIL that Giuseppe Zangara assassinated the mayor of Chicago in 1933. But, he was standing on a wobbly chair and so missed his real target, the man next to him - President elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was saved by a faulty folding chair.
Zyr4 TIL serial killer Carl Panzram would rape his male victims not because he was homosexual but because he wanted to establish dominance over them.
aYly TIL that after Thomas Edison ripped off the first film camera from France, he used copyright laws to restrict imports of other cameras to the US. Sometimes he would use hired thugs (the Edison mafia) to violently stop people from using other cameras.
Z8dB4 TIL The best-selling English translations of Rumi, the famous 13th Century Persian poet, were done by a woefully underqualified man who doesn't know Persian; never studied Islam or Sufism; took extreme liberties with the original texts; and omitted much of the Islamic references and context
7WVp TIL, the passenger pigeon went from one of the most abundant animals in the world, with flocks that would blacken the sky, to extinct in a little more than a century.