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TIL, there’s a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare” where everyone dies in a forest fire because the tortoise, having won the race and therefore seen as the fastest, is given the job of warning everyone.

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kjke TIL one of the world’s first scanning transmission electron microscopes was destroyed in a bombing raid in WW2.
8eKA8 TIL the Gestapo compiled a "Black Book" listing prominent residents of Great Britain to be rounded up after a successful invasion. In addition to obvious names like Churchill, the Nazis set their sights on Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf.
x65r5 TIL that symbols to denote irony or sarcasm in print have been around since at least the 1500s
R5la TIL the MI6 double agent that inspired James Bond warned the US about Pearl Harbor’s attack over four months before it happened.
DQ18v TIL that "The Pond" was a small US government intelligence organization that operated from 1942 and 1955. It worked in 32 countries, and after WWII was set up as a corporation contracted to the State Department, later merged with the CIA. The US government formally acknowledged it in 2001.