› added 6 years ago

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TIL of Gino Bartali, a cyclist who used his fame as a winner of the Tour de France to smuggle counterfeit documents hidden inside his bicycle through Nazi checkpoints in WWII Italy under the guise of training. These documents allowed as many as 800 Jews to escape persecution by the Nazis.

oWjA TIL a Rhode Island woman attempted to sue her husband for slander after he called her a whore in a crowded restaurant. After being presented evidence, the judge officially ruled that the husband’s statement was accurate. She then appealed to the Supreme Court, only to have that judge agree as well.
69vpZ TIL that Holy Trinity Church, London hosts an annual Clowns International service honouring deceased clowns and is attended by clowns in full costume. It's also home to the The Clown Egg Register. This is an archive of painted ceramic eggs that serve as a record of individual clowns' make-up design.
AD7r4 TIL that Pat Morita (Mr. Miyagi) spent his first 9 years of his life in a hospital and when he was finally well enough to leave, was sent to a Japanese internment camp in Arizona.
D1nQr TIL that some unmanned spacecraft don’t have colour cameras because they get a higher resolution if it’s black and white and because less information had to be transmitted, thus saving the space crafts power supply and is significantly deceases the time it takes to transmit the data back to earth.
5YlYr TIL: The gravestones of John Parr (The first British soldier to die in WW1) and George Edwin Ellison (The last British soldier to die in WW1) both face each other in the same graveyard