Bertelsmann

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The Anatomical Zodiac Man

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Logo of 1Malaysia Development Berhad

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Bertelsmann printed millions of Nazi-era devotional books and Wehrmacht field hymnals during World War II, then commissioned a self-exonerating history in 1998. An independent commission contradicted it in full by 2002.

Painted between 1412 and 1416 for the Duke of Berry, the February calendar page of the Très Riches Heures shows a peasant warming bare legs by a fire — the oldest surviving painted snow scene, accurate enough that meteorologists have studied it.

Under the Group Areas Act, apartheid bulldozed Cape Town's District Six — a jazz-loud, mosque-and-church neighbourhood of sixty thousand people — and relocated them to sand flats twelve miles away. The rubble sat empty for decades.

Malaysia's 1MDB sovereign wealth fund — created to build schools and hospitals — bought a $250 million superyacht, a Picasso, and financed The Wolf of Wall Street. The fund lost $4.5 billion. The prime minister who authorized it won an election first.

Designed in five and a half weeks by one man, 3.5 million unsold cartridges were buried under concrete in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill — a corporate burial that became an urban legend confirmed by excavation in 2014.

In 1221, Mongol forces killed an estimated 700,000 people at Merv in a single week — then cut the qanats that had kept Central Asia's largest city alive for centuries. The desert never gave it back.

A Scottish duelist who killed a man in 1694 talked his way into running France's entire money supply — then collapsed it. He fled Paris in a stolen carriage, died broke in Venice.

Herzog boiled and ate his own shoe — with garlic and duck fat — after Errol Morris finished a film Herzog bet he never would. The documentary of the meal runs 28 minutes. He called the shoe "quite acceptable."

The common swift lives its entire adult life in the air — sleeping, mating, and moulting on the wing — touching ground only to nest. It may fly two million kilometres in a lifetime without once choosing to land.