› added 2 years ago

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TIL about Mauro Prosperi who was lost in the Sahara. To avoid agonizing death from starvation and to save his wife from legal red tape, he slashed his wrists with a knife. However, due to his severe dehydration, his blood had clotted around the cuts. He reached a nomad tribe a few days later.

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BRdk TIL in Chios, Greece each year a ‘fireworks war’ is held by two nearby towns, where the objective is to hit each others town bell.
ayeo TIL of Captain Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese unarmed military observer with the UN during the Rwandan Genocide. Alone and against orders, he used his UN vehicle to ferry hundreds of Tutsis and moderate Hutus to safety, bluffing, bribing and begging his way through checkpoints manned by génocidaires.
5VO99 TIL in 1879, a French peasant woman and her husband claimed (falsely) to have inherited a large sum of money from a stranger who’s life they saved on a train. They lived in luxury for 20 years until the safe was opened and contained a brick and an English halfpenny.
DpMD TIL That the song Capt. Jean Luc Picard listened to when he thought the ship (and the entire United Federation of Planets) was lost to the Borg in the movie “First Contact” was about a sailor in the Trojan War who was worried he’d never see home again.
PvLg TIL: The Nazis during WW2 formed a plan called ‘Operation Bernard’ in which they were to crash Englands economy by counterfeiting £132m GBP and dropping it over England by planes. This would be worth £8.3bn today.