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TIL the 2019 collapse of the Thomas Cook travel agency triggered UK's largest peacetime repatriation. Called Operation Matterhorn, over 140,000 British tourists were recovered with 150 aircraft in 746 flights. During that time, the UK government briefly was UK's 5th largest airline

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epRoD TIL the longest poem in the world is the Hindu Mahābhārata. It's more than 5 times the length of the Bible, the Iliad, and the Odyssey combined! It has 220000 verses and about 1.8 million words.
p8ra8 TIL of the Fresnel lens, a specially crafted type of lens commonly used in lighthouses. Its design allows for a large aperture and short focal length without requiring the lens to be massive and heavy like a traditional convex lens. It also looks like a work of art.
6EQ6Y TIL that exclusive sale rights of colchicine, a 2000-year-old treatment for gout, was given to a pharmaceutical company in 2009. They raised the price 50x, costing the government over $50 million/year.
neyGb TIL that in 2018 Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro, created a campaign and paid a full-page ad saying its New Year resolution was to give up cigarettes and help those who can't quit smoking to change to better alternatives.
Zpj8D TIL that Gonzaga University is named in honor of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, a 23-year-old Italian Jesuit seminarian who died while attending to the sick who had been forced out of their homes and onto the streets during a plague epidemic in Rome in 1591.