› added 10 years ago

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TIL in 1988, Cuba was the only non-African nation to lend military support to anti-apartheid forces in South Africa that led to the successful defeat of US-backed mercenaries, and is an “example of principled anti-imperialist internationalism in the last decades of the twentieth century.”

PYvEJ Today I learned that the demand for mummies outstripped supply causing people to make fakes out of newer corpses in order to make a paint called Mummy Brown.
OA41 TIL ~900 Germans from the town of Demmin committed suicide in panic of the advancing Red Army. Mothers walked into rivers with a rock in a backpack and their babies in their arms. One man shot three young children, then their mothers, then his wife, then himself, but survived as a blind man.
m1dQy TIL NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft, which flew by Pluto in 2015, carries onboard a portion of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. Also onboard (among other things) are a nylon American Flag, a 1991 postage stamp that reads "Pluto: Not Yet Explored", and FL and MD state quarters.
5Yao9 TIL that India requires voting booths within 2 km of every registered voter. This means some poll workers trek for days through mountains and jungles to reach small, remote villages, sometimes for only a single registered voter.
LkyZp TIL: The Beggar's Opera written in 1728 was accused of being a "base form of entertainment". Similar to the way we blame videogames today; the opera was blamed for increasing crime rates and violence, due to the fact that its main characters were prisoners.