› added 6 years ago

159

TIL Cruise lines pay almost no taxes thanks to a maritime law loophole called "flags of convenience". Despite being headquartered in Miami, RCL and NCLH have all of their ships registered in the Bahamas. CCL has all of its ships registered in Panama.

Read more tourismconcern.org.uk

via reddit.com

7rM97 TIL of Diren Dede, a 17-year-old exchange student from Germany, who entered the garage of Markus Kaarma looking for alcohol, and Kaarma deliberately set alcohol out as bait. Kaarma was sentenced to 70 years in prison for deliberate homicide.
Rm0j TIL “got milk?” ads were originally translated to Spanish as “are you lactating?”
nKYr TIL that the Chinese government has been widely accused of harvesting and selling organs from imprisoned practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual practice and other political prisoners.
GAw6E TIL that Edgar Allan Poe wrote his first detective stories after trying to debunk a famous chess-playing "robot" called The Mechanical Turk in 1836. Poe asserted that a mechanical chess player would play perfectly, but noticed that the Turk occasionally erred, and therefore suspected its creation.
WO7L TIL That 2 million people died during the battle of Stalingrad. Both the Axis and USSR lost more men in that battle than the US did the whole war