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TIL the creators of Curious George fled Paris on homemade bicycles just hours before Hitler's army invaded during WWII. The Reys decided they wanted to bring several in-the-works manuscripts with them and managed to pack five in their meager belongings. One of them was the first Curious George book

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9rWD TIL: An Israeli captain who emptied the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a fleeing 13-year-old Palestinian girl was acquitted on all charges
NXQbe TIL that Batman was created almost at the same time as the Black Bat, a pulp fiction hero so similar that the publishers considered suing each other. They eventually found an agreement: the Black Bat wouldn't appear in comics, and in exchange, Batman wouldn't appear in pulp magazines.
5VvmD TIL That the current 50-State U.S. Flag was designed by a 17 year old in 1958 for a high school project. The flag was submitted to the White House after the student was told he could raise his B minus on the project if the flag was accepted by the government.
1a0V8 TIL Scientists identified a vast underground ecosystem of billions of micro-organisms below the earth - twice the size of the Earth's oceans. Life was shown to survive far beneath the Earth's surface for long periods of time, without energy from the Sun.
WkrAo TIL that the world record for spitting a cherry pit is 28.5 m or 93.5 feet.