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TIL that arabs had banned the export of unroasted coffee beans so that everyone would have to continue buying it from them but an Indian saint Budan smuggled 7 seeds in his beard risking capital punishment thereby starting the coffee production in India and ending arabian monopoly on it.

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4LKJ TIL that in 1983 a skull fragment was found in a bog in England and was reported to the authorities. They then pulled in a man suspected of murdering his wife who confessed to the act. The fragment was found to have belonged to a woman that died in 250 CE and the man was still tried and convicted.
e0kAg TIL that all astronauts going to the International Space Station are required to learn Russian, which can take up to 1100 class hours for English language speakers
EK4X TIL that all unreleased Kennedy assassination documents are scheduled to be released to the public by 2017, twenty-five years after the passage of the JFK Records Act. Among the items most sought after by researchers are some 1,171 documents still closed by the CIA on national security grounds.
b6DxN TIL that a young John F Kennedy sat in the public gallery of the House of Commons and watched then UK PM (Neville Chamberlain) declare war on Germany in 1939. Churchill also gave a speech which left an impression on JFK.
p8k9N TIL in 1995 Hayao Miyazaki directed a cyberpunk shortfilm for a rock song after having writer's block. He purposely misinterpreted the lyrics to make the video cryptic to evoke creative interpretations among viewers. SciFi writers and magazines called it "the most perfect short science fantasy film"