› added 9 years ago

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TIL while not strictly legal, starting in the 1690s, British husbands used to sell their wives to end bad marriages. It was usually an auction announced by newspaper ad, to which the wife was led by a rope around her neck. Often the buyer was pre-arranged & the sale was a form of symbolic separation

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4kn8w TIL China uses cloud seeding for weather manipulation to create everything from blue skies during the 2008 Olympic games to rain intense during droughts.
ZO74 TIL in Switzerland, it’s illegal to own just one guinea pig because they’re prone to loneliness.
6En9J TIL of Robert Maheu, an American businessman and lawyer, who worked for the FBI and CIA, and as the chief executive of Nevada operations for the industrialist Howard Hughes. He recruited the mob to assassinate Fidel Castro and his investigative agency was a model for television's Mission Impossible.
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