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TIL that during the East German coffee crisis in the 1970s, care packages from the West ended up providing an estimated 25% of all coffee in East Germany. Demand for the fruit bread which was the traditional return gift was so high a minister proposed a ban on gifting it.

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VbVp TIL: Abraham Lee Shakespeare was an American casual laborer who won a $30 million lottery jackpot, receiving $17 million in 2006. In 2009, his family declared him missing, and in January 2010 his body was found buried under a concrete slab in the backyard of an acquaintance.
OGPg6 TIL that after the USS Thresher submarine sank & imploded in 1963 due to construction and engineering oversights, an admiral remarked: "...it is important that we re-evaluate our present practices where, in the desire to make advancements, we may have forsaken the fundamentals of good engineering."
bWla TIL In 1974, Philippe Petit snuck into the World Trade Center disguised as a construction worker, stretched a steel cable between the towers with a bow and arrow, and walked across – 8 times.
EAVp TIL that OK Go wanted to distribute their album in the form of DNA and became the first band whose album was blocked by the FDA.
l77MK TIL just after WW2, the US occupied two provinces of Northern China with 50,000 marines to repatriate the 600,000+ Japanese soldiers and Korean conscripts still in China after the war since neither Japan nor either side of the Chinese Civil War were logistically capable of doing so at the time.