› added 5 years ago

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TIL that Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Jack Anderson was targeted by the Nixon administration for assassination in 1972. The plot was foiled when the assassination plotters, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were arrested for the Watergate break-in.

eaw6 TIL President Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou were fluent in Mandarin Chinese. During their years in the White House, they would often hold entire conversations in Chinese to prevent the staff and acquaintances from hearing what they were saying.
QNMKe TIL Boeing B17 pilots often accidentally raised the undercarriage after landing, destroying the propellors and damaging the underbelly, due to the undercarriage lever and the flap lever looking the same.
EWYw TIL A police department in Michigan staged a fake wedding - with undercover cops acting as the bride and groom - and invited local drug dealers to attend. At the reception, they busted them all at once.
jaOR TIL that famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, while aboard a fight in Norway, asked the flight crew to seat him in the smoking section, claiming that “If I cannot smoke, I should die.” The plane later crash landed into a bay, drowning everybody in the non-smoking section.
rRl7e TIL a man running an ultramarathon was joined by a stray dog for more than 77 miles (125 km) through the Gobi Desert, but he lost track of the dog after the race. With help from 20 volunteers, he finally found the dog after a 2-week search, named him Gobi and brought him back to live in Edinburgh.