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Steve Davis in 2007

The 1982 Embassy World Snooker Championship was a professional snooker tournament that took place between 30 April and 16 May 1982 at the Crucible Theatre, in Sheffield, England. It was the only event of the 1981–82 snooker season that carried world ranking points. Embassy, a British cigarette company, sponsored the tournament, and the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association governed the organisation of the event. It had a prize fund of £110,000, with the winner receiving £25,000. The defending champion, Steve Davis (pictured), had defeated Doug Mountjoy with a score of 18–12 in the previous year's final. In 1982, Davis was the bookmaker's favourite to win the tournament, but he lost 1–10 to Tony Knowles in the first round. Alex Higgins won his second world title by defeating Ray Reardon 18–15 in the final. Ten century breaks were made during the tournament, the highest of which was a 143 scored by Willie Thorne. (Full article...)

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Theatre Royal, Southampton

... that the Theatre Royal, Southampton (pictured), which Jane Austen visited in 1807, was described in 2013 as having "morphed into a hideous high-rise"?
... that Fabio Miretti received a standing ovation from Juventus fans after his Serie A debut as a starter?
... that Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co. was the first time a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices agreed that a challenged statute failed the rational basis test?
... that the lineups for two songs in the single "Kaze wo Matsu" were determined by the century in which the singers were born?
... that Roslyn Lindheim, who designed hospitals, was the first architect to be elected to the National Academy of Medicine?
... that coral cores from Flinders Reef capture environmental changes caused by the use of nuclear weapons?
... that Elizabeth Thorn was six months pregnant when she buried approximately one hundred fallen soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg?
... that a walrus named Freya was spotted riding a Walrus-class submarine, and later sank several boats in the Oslofjord?

In the news

William Ruto

William Ruto (pictured) is elected President of Kenya.
In Giza, Egypt, a church fire spreads to a nursery, killing 41 people, including at least 18 children.
Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, is critically injured after a stabbing at a speech in the United States.
A mass fish kill occurs in the river Oder in Poland and Germany.

On this day

August 24: Feast day of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle (Western Christianity); Independence Day in Ukraine (1991)

1888–89 New Zealand Native football team

410 – Rome was sacked for the first time in approximately 800 years by the Visigoths under Alaric I.
1643 – A Dutch expedition arrived at the mouth of the Valdivia River, in present-day Chile, to establish a new colony in the ruins of the abandoned Spanish settlement of Valdivia.
1889 – The predominantly Māori New Zealand Native football team (pictured) played the last match of their 107-game tour, the longest in rugby union history.
1942 – World War II: At the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, bombers from the U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Ryūjō near Santa Isabel Island, contributing to an Allied victory.
1992 – Hurricane Andrew, the third-most intense Category 5 cyclone to impact the United States in the 20th century, made landfall in southern Florida.

Magnus Barefoot (d. 1103)
William Wilberforce (b. 1759)
Anže Kopitar (b. 1987)

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Today's featured picture

Kobe Bryant (1978–2020) was an American professional basketball player who spent his entire twenty-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a shooting guard. Widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Bryant won five NBA championships and was an eighteen-time NBA All-Star, a fifteen-time member of the All-NBA Team, the 2008 NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP), and a two-time NBA Finals MVP. He was posthumously voted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020, and August 24 of that year was commemorated as Kobe Bryant Day in recognition of his jersey numbers, 8 and 24. This photograph depicts Bryant playing for the Lakers against the Golden State Warriors in 2005.

Photograph credit: Joseph A. Lee; edited by Kaldari

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