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After 13 years orbiting Saturn, the $3.9 billion Cassini was steered into the planet's atmosphere on purpose — a controlled suicide to avoid contaminating moons that might harbor life.

Francisco Macías Nguema killed or exiled roughly one-third of Equatorial Guinea's 300,000 citizens, banned the word 'intellectual,' and had the country's last lubricating oil poured into the ocean to prevent escape by boat.

The Taichang Emperor reigned 29 days before dying — reportedly after swallowing red pills supplied by a court official named Li Kezhuo, whose formula was never fully disclosed.

Mont Ventoux's summit is bare white limestone — no trees, no shade above 1,800 metres. Simpson died here in 1967; Chris Froome ran up it on foot in 2016 after his bike shattered on a crash.

Steve Schwarzman spent $3 million on his 60th birthday party — a Rod Stewart performance, a portrait of himself unveiled mid-room — then wrote a memoir advising readers to 'never do anything small.' The portrait still hangs at Blackstone.

Iraq invaded Kuwait at 2 a.m. on August 2, 1990, partly because Kuwait was drilling at a slant into the Rumaila oil field beneath their shared border — stealing, Baghdad claimed, $2.4 billion in Iraqi oil.

Each February, priests called Luperci ran Rome's streets half-naked, slapping women with strips of goatskin freshly cut from a just-sacrificed animal — the whip's touch was believed to cure barrenness.

The Mirdita, a highland Catholic Albanian clan, rose against the Serbian army in 1921 — not over nationalism or religion, but because Serbian officers had violated blood-feud protocols that predated any state they recognized.

Cyril Radcliffe had never set foot in India when he drew the border dividing 14 million people in five weeks. He left before the violence began and never returned — reportedly burning his papers.