› added 10 years ago

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TIL Mika Brzezinski, an MSNBC News Anchor, refused to read a report about Paris Hilton’s release from jail on National Television and ranking it over a story on the Iraq War. Then after repeatingly being pressured to do the story, she attempted to light the script on fire on the air.

GYBg1 TIL that until 1999 in Germany, bribes were a tax-deductible business expense, and there were no penalties for bribing foreign officials. The German company Siemens used to engage in bribery in developing countries, where bribery was common, and continued to do so after criminalizing it in 1999.
4XYJR Fifty years ago today, air stewardess Vesna Vulovic plunged more than 33,000 feet from an exploding airliner, landed in a Czechoslovak mountain range, and survived. Subsequently, it was determined that Vulovic’s fall was the highest that a human has ever sustained without a parachute.
OGKA7 TIL that during WW2, Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German military intelligence, actively sabotaged Hitler's plans during the entire war. Canaris was caught and executed near the end of the war, in april 1945.
9QrM TIL: A man tried to rob a bank after paying $500 to a wizard to make him invisible. Thinking no one could see him, he strolled into a bank in Tehran and started snatching money out of people’s hands
8eyx4 TIL that “court jesters” were often used to give bad news to the monarch that no one else would dare deliver. When the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys, Phillip VI’s jester told him that the English sailors “don’t even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French”