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TIL that the creators of "Babar the Elephant" had a son who was a rising classical piano star, but gave it all up in 1970s to become a silent Benedictine monk. He is still alive today, residing in a monastery in En-Calcat, France.

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e0yJ4 TIL Benito Mussolini signed Vatican City into existence. The 1929 Lateran Treaty ended the dispute between the Italian government & the Catholic Church, which allowed the Vatican to exist as its own sovereign state and compensated the church $92 million (> $1 billion today) for the Papal states.
KYN7B TIL about the Duquesne spy ring, the largest espionage case in US history that ended in convictions, where 33 members of a nazi german espionage network were sentenced to a total of over 300 years in prison. They were lead by a man who had advised Theodore Roosevelt on big-game hunting.
MEaV TIL Dwight D. Eisenhower said “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants…It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals…We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
rNmdW TIL after fighting in WWI, A. A. Milne had PTSD so severe, he was reminded of whizzing bullets by buzzing bees, and cannons firing by balloons popping. Wanting a lighthearted distraction and a way to explain to his son the difficulties of war, he wrote Winnie the Pooh stories as his way of doing so.
kOmog TIL about the ghostly radio station, commonly known as "the Buzzer", situated in Russia that no one claims to run. It’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for the last three-and-a-half decades. Anyone can listen to it by tuning a radio to 4625 kHz.