› added 8 years ago

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TIL in the 70s, while Watergate was raging, a far more widely affecting scandal was being exposed: COINTELPRO – decades of FBI abuse of power and assassinations against political groups and individuals, incl. Martin Luther King, students, pacifists, women’s rights campaigners and notable Americans.

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8R08 TIL that the US airforce dropped pamphlets in Hiroshima warning people of the bombing
w0N8 TIL the Nazi’s used special buses that had their exhaust fed into the passenger compartment where they transported mentally disabled people in order to kill them.
e0poL TIL the saying 'Great minds think alike' has a second part, 'and small minds rarely differ.'
VBY9B TIL the world's shortest war happened in Zanzibar when the Sultan Khalid bin Bargash refused Britain's order to give Hamoud bin Muhammad his throne, the war started at exactly 9 a.m. and lasted 40 minutes.
0wY7p TIL that Häagen-Dazs is an American company, started by two Jewish brothers in the Bronx. “Häagen Dazs” are nonsensical words invented to sound Danish because the brothers wanted to pay tribute to the Danish treatment of Jews in WWII.