› added 5 years ago

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TIL of a Swedish man who was wrongly imprisoned for a murder for 14 years until a true-crime podcast brought out clues that led to his exoneration. Awarded a record sum in damages of 18 million SEK, he now lives in Canary Islands with his wife who was his Spanish-language teacher in prison.

9YZ7D TIL on April 1st, 1993 a San Diego Radio station reported that the space shuttle Discovery had to make an emergency landing at the local airport at 8:30 am. Over 1000 people headed for the landing site to catch a glimpse, crowding the airport and causing traffic jams. It was an April Fools hoax.
X01WD TIL of Alfred Redl, an Austrian counterintelligence officer who spent about ten years up to 1913 sending major military secrets to Russia, including Austria's plan for invading Serbia, which Russia then handed to Serbia.
jD6R TIL that 7 years ago a man designed a Euthanasia Roller Coaster. It pulled 10 g’s and was designed to both thrill and kill 24 passengers at a time.
Y7ZWG TIL that Alexei Nikolaevich, son of the last Russian tsar and heir to the throne, had a severe case of hemophilia inherited from his mother, which in turn she had acquired through the line of her maternal grandmother Victoria of the United Kingdom.
7rmeX TIL that as an alternative Jewish Homeland to then British Palestine, Stalin's USSR set aside a small part of Siberia as a Jewish autonomous region. While largely unsuccessful the autonomous region still exists today. A collective farm was even called "Stalinfeld"