› added 4 years ago

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TIL of the 228 Incident, when the govt. of Taiwan massacred between 5,000 to 28,000 protestors, an event which was the precursor to the White Terror - a 38 year period of martial law - in which tens of thousands of other Taiwanese went missing, died or were imprisoned.

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4kdxN TIL in 2011, a 29-year-old Aussie bartender discovered an ATM error that let him take out more cash than he had in the bank. For four-and-a-half months, he went on a spending spree and blew through approximately $1.6 million of the bank's funds.
wL9g1 TIL that Vlad Dracula was called Vlad the Impaler because when his country was invaded by Ottomans, he had hundreds of soldiers impaled by putting stakes through their rectum in a way that missed their vital organs and kept them living and writhing for days to make an example for incoming invaders
VAOZ TIL That Neither France nor Morocco were the first countries to acknowledge U.S Sovereignty, in reality, the Danish and Dutch were the first, saluting American ships in the West Indies in 1776.
p8jgp TIL About 73 year old Harriet Baker. ~1990, her husband died leaving her their fully paid home. Scientologists learned of the home, told her an audit could cure her of grief, supplied her with a $45,000 mortgage and then took it for her audit
d87Br TIL that J.K. Rowling wrote a real person into The Goblet of Fire. The girl was named Natalie McDonald, a Harry Potter fan who was dying of leukaemia while Rowling was still writing the book. Her character is a first-year who dons the sorting hat and is sorted into Griffindor.