› added 9 years ago

700

TIL the French secret service planted mines on a Greenpeace ship, sinking it and killing one person.

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K77B TIL the Maunder minimum was a period of record-low sunspot activity that lasted from 1645 to 1715. This period coincides with the Little Ice Age and suggested to scientists that solar activity plays a major role in Earth’s climate.
697A7 TIL British Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe paid hitmen to kill his former lover Norman Josiffe in the 1970s
WEl8 TIL that Teddy Roosevelt advocated women’s suffrage in his senior thesis (1880) making one of his professors say he was too influenced by feeling to be entirely masculine
8PA8 TIL that the Tappan Zee Bridge, on which 140,000 people drive daily, is so structurally unsound that New York state aides refer to it as the “hold-your-breath bridge” while other experts call it the “scariest of scaries”
9KEm TIL the Middle East used to be covered in vast forests, but was deforested for building projects causing erosion that turned much of the area into desert.