› added 11 years ago

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TIL that in 1985 Soviets ended a hostage crisis within 4 weeks by castrating & killing a relative of a Hezbollah leader then sending the severed organs. A reporter later said, “This is the way the Soviets operate. They do things - they don’t talk. And this is the language the Hezbollah understand.”

5VXVD TIL - Methuselah is a 4,854-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing high in the White Mountains of Inyo County in eastern California. It is recognized as the non-clonal tree with the greatest confirmed age in the world.
VLQD TIL: in 1975, after a skydiving student’s main parachute became entangled with the plane, he deployed his reserve chute. This caused the plane to stall and engines to fail. Everybody on board survived as the plane descended under the reserve chute.
KRAE TIL that a father in South Carolina almost lost custody of his infant daughter when she was put up for adoption by her mother. 33 states require unmarried fathers to register as ‘responsible fathers’ in order to retain the right to be notified of an adoption or termination of parental rights action.
6E4dw TIL that Peter Mayhew, the actor for Chewbacca in the Star Wars franchise, would occasionally deliver his lines in english to add context for the other actors. Most of the time Mayhew was silent and mimed the character; all of Chewbacca's iconic roars were added in later
YgNZ TIL that the LDS church still officially teaches against interracial marriage, generally.