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TIL In 1969 a Red Army deserter fired multiple shots at a motorcade carrying Leonid Brezhnev and several Cosmonauts. While the assassination attempt was unsuccessful, an official statement wasn't released for several days. Many details were suppressed until years afterwards.

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dxXZ TIL that the phrase “You’ve got guts” originated from the American Civil War era during which over 211,000 soldiers were diagnosed with chronic diarrhea. Because of its frequency, the expression arose that a man “had to have good guts to be a good soldier.”
77Ex TIL Hattie McDaniel, the first African American Oscar winner, was required to sit at a segregated table; her white agent, William Meiklejohn, sat at the same table. The hotel hosting the ceremony had a strict no-blacks policy, but allowed McDaniel in as a favor.
awDeb TIL There was a special counsel appointed to investigate the finances of Jimmy Carter's family peanut business. After a year and a half the investigation concluded in a 239 page report that there was no evidence that Carter had done anything illegal.
a8GML TIL with a radius between 640 and 764 times that of the Sun, the surface of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse (the tenth-brightest star in the night), if it were at the centre of our Solar System, would lie beyond the asteroid belt and it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
NX4Ve TIL In the 19th and 20th century, there were dozens of documented cases of people's teeth exploding in their mouths. Primitive metal fillings were suspected to be the cause.