The mayor of Paris has approved a resolution prohibiting Tom Cruise from being made an honorary citizen. Tom Cruise is a member of Scientology, a controversial religious group that has been labelled a cult in France. Tom Cruise sought to become an honorary citizen of Paris in 2005, but the city's officials refused because of his involvement with Scientology.

When Santa Claus travels throughout the world on Christmas Eve, you may be confident that he is legally permitted to operate his sleigh—at least in the United States. The cheerful man in the red suit received his pilot's certificate from Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics William P. MacCracken in 1927.

Yes, despite being a fictional species, the legendary unicorn is the national animal of Scotland, chosen because of its link with supremacy and chivalry and purity and innocence in Celtic mythology. BRB, I'm leaving for Scotland right now.

The French army is the only one in Europe that still employs carrier pigeons. These pigeons, which are housed at Mont Valérien near Paris, can be deployed to carry out broadcasts in the event of a severe disaster.

To begin, rinse your piala (small tea bowl) with a drop of hot tea, then return a bowlful to the kettle three times before the tea is regarded safe to drink. It's definitely a one-of-a-kind afternoon tea! Traditional local desserts are frequently provided alongside.

Kraft Foods once polled hundreds of Oreo eaters (see out these cookie butter Oreos!). They discovered that biters are more laid-back and self-assured, whereas dunkers are more active and daring. Twisters, on the other hand, are delicate and fashionable.

Speaking of heavily inhabited places, Manhattan, the most densely populated of New York City's five boroughs, has over 200 zip codes. Some buildings are even large enough to have their own elevator. The Empire State, Chrysler, and MetLife buildings are just a few examples of structures that have exclusive rights to their own unique zip code.

Though pig includes some sodium naturally (as does all meat), the saltiness we appreciate in ham, bacon, and a variety of other pork products is really the result of curing and brining procedures. After soaking in salt or salt water, fresh meat gets dehydrated, seasoned, and preserved. This is also the method used to make salami, pepperoni, and other cured meats.

If you go shopping at the Christmas Market in Nuremberg, Germany, you'll be participating in a tradition that dates back hundreds of years. Proof of this can be discovered in a little box kept safe by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. The modest gift is inscribed, "Sent to Regina Susanna Harßdörfferin by Miss Susanna Eleonora Erbsin (or Elbsin) on the occasion of the Christmas Market of 1628."

Plenty of Japanese celebrate Christmas, but the festive fare isn’t what you might expect. In Japan, it’s traditional to head to your local KFC on Christmas Eve. An estimated 3.6 million Japanese feast on the KFC Christmas Dinner and hours of queuing and ordering weeks in advance is expected. Some say turkey and chicken wasn’t widely available for the Christmas-curious Japanese, so Colonel Sanders stepped in to answer the demand…

First, she misplaces her shoe while delivering breakfast trays. She then misplaces her glass slipper while fleeing the ball. Finally, on her wedding day, her shoe falls off.

The Terracotta Army is part of Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum, the world's largest ancient imperial tomb complex. There are approximately 8,000 different life-size statues that have been discovered. It is the most significant discovery of its kind. The statues stand between 175 and 190 cm tall. Everybody has different gestures and facial expressions, and some even have different colors. It reveals a lot about the Qin Empire's military, technology, arts, culture, and military.

You probably don’t know this, but the calendar that we use today was invented by ancient Egyptians. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the first calendar known to humankind was invented in Egypt. In fact, it is the year 6264 in the Egyptian calendar.

The ancient Egyptians used the 12-month calendar like we do today. However, each month was always 30 days which meant that their years were only 360 days in total causing the years to fall out of sync with the seasons. So to make up for the lost time, they held a 5-day festival at the end of each year.

Paris is the fashion capital, and the majority of well-known fashion brands are French (Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Jacquemus, you name it). Of course, they were the ones who came up with the military uniforms as well. The French were the first to deploy camouflage clothes in the military; the name "camouflage" loosely translates to "make up for the stage."

If you ate a Macintosh apple and planted the seed, the tree that grew would produce apples that didn't look or taste like Macintoshes. Instead of planting seeds, growers graft a cutting from a genetically desirable tree onto an existing branch or sapling (called the "rootstock"), resulting in apples that are genetically identical to those on the tree from which it was cut. If you look closely at the tree in the photo, you can see that there are several different types of apples on the various branches, all of which are grafted onto the same rootstock tree.

However, Moldova's second language, Gagauz, is on the verge of extinction. The Turkic language, which is spoken in the Autonomous Region of Gagauz, is classified as severely endangered by Unesco.

Being the first president of the United States apparently wasn't enough for George Washington throughout his lifetime. Following his presidency, Washington established a whiskey distillery. Washington's distillery was the largest in the country by 1799, producing 11,000 gallons of unaged whiskey. However, after the president's death, the company was no longer in operation.

According to new research based on minutes of conversations between Japanese government officials in the run-up to capitulation, the Soviet Union's surprise entry into the conflict with Japan had a more crucial impact.

Lepioshka, or good luck bread, is a regional bread. An age-old tradition states that it should never be put upside down, since this is said to bring ill luck. Even if it's in a bag, you shouldn't leave it on the ground!

Mount Hoverla is Ukraine's highest peak, standing at 2061 meters. Mount Hoverla is a Carpathian mountain range. Mount Hoverla has been a popular tourist destination since the late 1800s. Mountain has grown in popularity as an extreme sports destination throughout the years.

Bananas contain potassium, which decays and makes them mildly radioactive, making them one of our weirdest scientific facts. But this is one of those amusing science facts about which you need not be concerned. According to Forbes, you’d have to consume 10,000,000 bananas all at once to die of radiation exposure.

Countries having borders within the Arctic Circle are members of the Arctic Council, which, according to its website, "is the sole circumpolar platform for political talks on Arctic problems, comprising all Arctic governments and with the active involvement of its Indigenous Peoples." The Council strives to examine and solve the environmental and social concerns that the people and wildlife that live there confront.

The endangered European bison, sometimes known as the wisent, is Europe's biggest land mammal, weighing more than 600kg on average. They may be found roaming the 150,000 hectares of Poland's Biaowiea Primeval Forest — Europe's remaining primaeval forest, which originally stretched across the continent thousands of years ago.

During International War I, Europe was at war, and world powers like Britain were organizing their armies. By 1917, one renowned British admiral of the Royal Navy had retired and wrote to Winston Churchill to express his thoughts on the day's headlines, some of which were so thrilling that he wrote, "O.M.G. (Oh! My! God!)." How could he have realized that the acronym he created would go on to become one of the world's most-used phrases?

Synsepalum dulcificum, also known as "Miracle Fruit," makes sour foods taste sweet when consumed. An attempt was made in the 1970s to commercialise this fruit for this purpose, but it failed. There have been allegations that the sugar industry sabotaged their research in order to avoid losing business.