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Holkham Hall is an 18th-century country house in Norfolk, England, constructed in the Neo-Palladian style for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester. The hall was designed by the architect William Kent, with contributions from Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, the Norfolk architect and surveyor Matthew Brettingham and Thomas Coke himself. Holkham is one of England's finest examples of the Palladian revival style of architecture. The exterior consists of a central block, of two storeys and four flanking wings. The interior of the hall is opulent, but by the standards of the day, simply decorated and furnished. The Holkham estate was built up by Sir Edward Coke, a lawyer in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I and the founder of his family's fortune. It remains the ancestral home of the Coke family, who became Earls of Leicester. The house is a Grade I listed building, and its park is listed as Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. (Full article...)

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Flooding near Hunt, Texas

Flooding in Central Texas (pictured), United States, leaves at least 120 people dead.
Astronomers announce the discovery of 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object passing through the Solar System.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile releases the first light images from its new 8.4-metre (28 ft) telescope.
In basketball, the Oklahoma City Thunder defeat the Indiana Pacers to win the NBA Finals.

On this day

July 12

An AH-64 Apache helicopter

1913 – Second Balkan War: The Serbian Army began the Siege of Vidin, which they abandoned six days later when an armistice between the Serbs and Bulgarians was signed.
1920 – The Soviet–Lithuanian Peace Treaty was signed, with Soviet Russia agreeing to recognize an independent Lithuania.

1948 – Arab–Israeli War: Israel Defense Forces officer Yitzhak Rabin signed an order to expel Palestinians from the towns of Lydda and Ramle.
1997 – Hayao Miyazaki's animated film Princess Mononoke is released, becoming the highest-grossing film in Japan for a few months.
2007 – Two U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopters (pictured) conducted a series of air-to-ground attacks in Baghdad.

Josiah Wedgwood (b. 1730)
Elsie de Wolfe (d. 1950)
Sanjay Manjrekar (b. 1965)
Mylène Jampanoï (b. 1980)

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Today's featured picture

Slime mold is an informal name given to a polyphyletic assemblage of unrelated eukaryotic organisms in the clades Stramenopiles, Rhizaria, Discoba, Amoebozoa and Holomycota. Most are near-microscopic; those in Myxogastria form larger plasmodial slime molds that are visible to the naked eye. Most slime molds are terrestrial and free-living, typically in damp shady habitats such as in or on the surface of rotting wood. Some myxogastrians and protostelians are aquatic or semi-aquatic. The phytomyxea are parasitic, living inside their plant hosts. Geographically, slime molds are cosmopolitan in distribution. A small number of species occur in regions as dry as the Atacama Desert and as cold as the Arctic; they are abundant in the tropics, especially in rainforests. This picture shows a group of sporangia of the slime mold Comatricha nigra, photographed in a garden in Berlin, Germany.

Photograph credit: Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas

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