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TIL the French writer Guy de Maupassant ate lunch at the base of the Eiffel Tower almost every day because he hated its design so much, it was the one place in Paris where he couldn't see it.

xQdk TIL: The most recycled material in the US is asphalt. “99% of all asphalt is recycled & used to fix/build roads…US taxpayers saved $2.2B in 2011 by using recycled materials to pave roads. 66.7M tons of reclaimed asphalt pavement & 1.2M tons of reclaimed asphalt shingles went into paving projects.”
nWey7 TIL in 1922 Deputy Prime Minister to Ireland Kevin O'Higgins ordered the execution of Rory O'Connor, who was the best man at his wedding only one year prior.
d60B TIL Al Sharpton led the public civil rights involvement of a rape case of Tawana Brawley in which 6 whites (including police officers) were accused of raping the young girl and putting her in a trash bag covered in feces. The jury later found the defendants innocent and the story fabricated.
LArd TIL that an estimated 2 million German women were raped during the later part of WWII. The majority of the rapes took place in the Soviet occupation zone. This is considered by some to be the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”.
65wZ TIL the Qibya massacre, occurred in October 1953 when Israeli troops under Ariel Sharon attacked the village of Qibya in the West Bank. Sixty-nine Palestinian Arabs, two-thirds of them women and children, were killed. Forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque were destroyed.