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TIL German discount supermarket Lidl has failed to succeed in Norway, although being successful in other places. They left in 2008 after 4 years. Reasons stated for the failure are Norwegians not liking the foreign food, treatment of workers in other countries and money going out of the country.

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d8ndr TIL about Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, an extremely rare illness, which causes episodes of being mostly asleep for weeks at a time. If awake during an episode, sufferers are confused about what is real and what is a dream. The condition appears in adolescence and resolves itself 10-15 years later.
v1VG7 TIL farming in Japan is done mostly by senior citizens -- 63.5% of farmers are older than 65
MemDK TIL: The common claim that the majority of soldiers in WW2 never fired their weapons or deliberately aimed above the enemy's heads (because they did not want to kill) is based on now-discredited research.
DrJV TIL after a bloody war with Ethiopia in 2001, half of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki’s Cabinet signed a letter asking him to reconsider his authoritarian style of government. He promptly charged his own ministers with treason and threw them in jail, where they remain today.
gMayA Around 1 million people in Ireland—as well as 20,000 people in the United States—can speak Irish. It’s an ancient and unfamiliar-looking language in the Celtic group, making it a linguistic cousin of other ancient languages like Welsh, Scots, Manx, and Breton. To English speakers though, it’s a tough language to master. It has a relatively complex grammar that sees words inflected in an array of different contexts ignored in English. It uses a different word order from English that places the verb, rather than the subject, at the head of the clause. And it uses an alphabet traditionally comprising just 18 letters, so words are often pronounced completely differently from what an English speaker might expect.