› added 11 years ago

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TIL In Nigeria there are scam artists who sell you houses by pretending to be the owners and get paid a considerable deposit by deceiving buyers. As a result, “This house is not for sale” is painted on many homes in Nigeria

OGeja TIL the 2019 collapse of the Thomas Cook travel agency triggered UK's largest peacetime repatriation. Called Operation Matterhorn, over 140,000 British tourists were recovered with 150 aircraft in 746 flights. During that time, the UK government briefly was UK's 5th largest airline
GAWwE TIL a linguistic study discovered that winter workers in Antarctica started to develop a new accent. They noticed a change after measuring the participants' vocal characteristics before and after their visit. This is the result of them being isolated as a group and interacting with only one another.
8alwa TIL that when Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper, was being promoted for 257 confirmed kills against the invading Germans her acceptance speech was simply "I'll get more".
oBrVr TIL in 2013, a photographer recorded seventeen seconds of footage of an elusive night parrot—a Lazarus species that hadn't been spotted in nearly a century. A bird expert called it "the bird-watching equivalent of finding Elvis flipping burgers in an outback roadhouse."
GYeM4 TIL that the BBC publishes in the informal oral language of Nigerian Pidgin, which is spoken by ~75mil people across Nigeria and neighbouring countries, but due to its informality and variety of dialects does not currently have an agreed written form.