› added 6 years ago

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TIL that Mark Taimanov, a Russian chess Grandmaster, after losing 6-0 to Bobby Fischer in 1971's World Chess Championship Candidates quarterfinal, got his salary and his ability to leave the country taken away, aswell as being censored in the press because the Russian government was so embarrassed.

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via reddit.com

awR59 TIL that during the American Civil War, several divisions of the confederate army had a large snowball fight. It started when a couple of hundred men from Texas plotted a friendly fight with men from Arkansas, which spiralled into a brawl involving 9,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia.
eZOJ TIL that Mythbuster’s Grant Imahara built the R2-D2 in Star Wars Ep.1&2, and the Energizer Bunny
0wbaL TIL that California trains and employs prisoners to fight fires, but then bans them from getting the license they need to become full-time firefighters after they are released.
EggW7 TIL Angela Orosz was one of the only two surviving babies ever born in Auschwitz
DDpj TIL eight of the July 20th, 1944 conspirators to assassinate Hitler were punished so severely, that they were slowly strangled with piano wire and revived multiple times only to be killed again. And all of this was filmed for Hitler to personally view at his leisure.