1World War 2 veterans
There are 558,000 USA World War 2 veterans still alive today.
2. Pioneering shock rocker Alice Cooper credits golf with helping him overcome alcohol addiction and plays the game up to 6 days a week.
3. In 2003, Lockheed Martin accidentally dropped a NASA satellite while turning it sideways, causing $135M in damages.
4. In the 1930's Benny Goodman, American jazz clarinetist, and bandleader hired prominent black musicians to play and tour with his band. This meant being banned touring in the South for breaking anti-segregation laws.
5. The process of seppuku, suicide by disemboweling to preserve honor, eventually became so ritualized that the abdominal cut was not even needed. The samurai merely reached for a fan instead of a knife, and doing so signaled the merciful beheading strike by the samurai's assistant.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Titanic
When the Titanic sunk, the official investigation declared that it went down in one piece, despite the reports of survivors that they witnessed the breakup. Only in 1985 when the wreck was discovered were the survivors stories finally confirmed.
7. The USA throws away the equivalent of 125 school buses full of plastic drinking straws on a daily basis.
8. Living in an area where you can see the ocean has been found to reduce psychological stress, even after controlling for factors such as income and neighborhood status.
9. Pregnant women in Auschwitz were told they would receive double portions of food but were sent to gas chambers instead.
10. In 1980, Shenzhen in China had a population of 30,000. In 2017, that had sex-centupled to nearly 20,000,000. It is believed to be the fastest growing city in human history.
11German military
In 1916, the German military conducted the Judenzählung (census of Jews). Designed to confirm accusations of lack of patriotism among German Jews, the census disproved the charges. In fact, a higher percentage of German Jews fought in World War 1 than of any other ethnic, religious or political group in Germany.
12. To put an end to the 2002 Nord-Ost siege in Moscow, Russian officials decided to use a classified gas to put everyone inside asleep, but the gas killed over hundreds of the hostages, while Russian officials would not tell doctors what gas was used.
13. The "Freestyle" Stroke is actually called the Front Crawl. It just happens that in the freestyle swimming competition Front Crawl is universally the fastest stroke so everyone uses it. That is where the name/misnamed stroke comes from.
14. A 1000-year-old remedy book contained a treatment for MRSA, nearly 800 years before bacteria was discovered.
15. A man named Bradley Birkenfeld, who was jailed for 40 months, upon release from the prison received the largest whistleblower award in History of $104,000,000.
16King Henry VIII
Former King of England King Henry VIII may have possibly had a rare blood type (Kell positive), which would explain his wives' and mistresses' had many miscarriages as well as his midlife physical and mental deterioration.
17. Hugh O'Flaherty was a priest who saved the lives of 6500 Allied soldiers and Jews during World War 2 by hiding them in farms, homes, and convents. He was a master at disguises and evaded capture by the Gestapo many times, earning him the nickname "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican".
18. In 1952, a French man named Paul Félix Armand Delille used a contagious and deadly virus to kill rabbits on his estate. It spread out of control, killing up to 98% of rabbits in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Britain. He was later given a medal by the head of the Department of Rivers and Forests.
19. The Harvard debate team once lost to a team of inmates serving time for manslaughter.
20. Our Milky Way is home to the darkest planet ever discovered, TrES-2b, the coal-black planet which absorbs almost 100% of the light that falls on it.
21Dolph Lundgren
Dolph Lundgren had a Fulbright scholarship to MIT to study chemical engineering, and road-tripped up from New York City on a motorcycle and rolled onto campus with his then girlfriend Grace Jones on the back.
22. In the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao Zedong invited people to openly express their opinions and have free discussions. Once this happened, he cracked down on those who said the wrong things.
23. Scientists say caesarian births are "affecting human evolution" because women with narrow hips are spreading this genetic predisposition to their daughters.
24. Multiple people have died attempting to cross a seemingly calm, innocent creek called the Bolton Strid in Yorkshire, England. The stream actually hosts multiple underwater cave systems and dangerous currents below the surface that have sucked numerous people to their deaths.
25. A New York man named Paul J. Newman was arrested for fraud after pretending to be an architect in a bust referred to by the state as "Operation Vandelay Industries". “For over seven years the defendant has pretended to be a registered architect, deceiving hundreds of New Yorkers — including families and senior citizens — with the sole goal of enriching himself,” Mr. Schneiderman said in a statement about what his office called Operation Vandelay Industries. “By allegedly falsifying building plans, code compliance inspections, and field reports, the defendant jeopardized the safety of those who resided in and frequented the buildings he was contracted to work on.”
