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04:17, Thursday, 13 June 2024
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Wreckage from the Battle of Villers-Bocage

The Battle of Villers-Bocage took place in Normandy, France, on 13 June 1944 during World War II. Following the D-Day landings on 6 June, the Germans established defences in front of Caen. The British attacked to attempt to exploit a gap in the German defences west of the city. They reached Villers-Bocage without incident in the morning but were ambushed by Tiger I tanks as they left the town and numerous tanks, anti-tank guns and transport vehicles were destroyed. The Germans then attacked the town but were repulsed. The British withdrew west of Villers-Bocage that evening and repulsed another attack the next day. The British conduct in the battle was controversial because their withdrawal marked the end of the post–D-Day "scramble for ground" and the start of an attritional battle for Caen. Some historians wrote that the British attack was a failure caused by a lack of conviction among some senior commanders; others judged the British force to be insufficiently strong for the task. (Full article...)

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In The News...

Saulos Chilima

A plane crash in Mzimba, Malawi, kills nine people, including Vice President Saulos Chilima (pictured).
In tennis, Iga Świątek wins the Women's Singles and Carlos Alcaraz wins the Men's Singles at the French Open.
In the Indian general election, the National Democratic Alliance, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is re-elected with a reduced majority.
The Boeing Starliner spacecraft conducts its first crewed flight, carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station.

On This Day...

June 13

USS Jeannette

1525 – Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, beginning the practice of clerical marriage in Protestantism.
1881 – The Jeannette expedition to reach the North Pole from the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Strait came to an end when the USS Jeannette (pictured) was finally crushed and sank after having been trapped in ice for almost two years.
1952 – Soviet aircraft shot down a Swedish military plane carrying out signals-intelligence gathering operations, followed three days later by the shootdown of a second plane searching for the first one.
1969 – Preston Smith, Governor of Texas, signed a law converting a research arm of Texas Instruments into the University of Texas at Dallas.
2013 – Some of the closest advisors and collaborators of Czech prime minister Petr Nečas were arrested for corruption.

Henry Middleton (d. 1784)
Manuel Marques de Sousa, Count of Porto Alegre (b. 1804)
Charles Algernon Parsons (b. 1854)
Fran Allison (d. 1989)

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Did You Know...

Talia and Tori DellaPeruta

... that sisters Talia and Tori DellaPeruta (both pictured), college teammates at North Carolina, play soccer professionally for Sampdoria?
... that, as minister, Simon de Graaff would receive daily shipments of documents by bicycle?
... that the Byzantine's weak defenses around the Lycus valley played a pivotal role in the fall of Constantinople?
... that a graphic novel for teens was among the 10 most challenged books in the United States in 2023?
... that the American band Grupo Frontera collaborated with the media franchise Transformers on a trailer to promote their second studio album?
... that if the Devizes Plot had been successful, 7,000 German prisoners of war would have escaped and attacked RAF Yatesbury?
... that Fredrick Wangabo Mwenengabo, a Congolese-Canadian anthropologist and human rights activist, survived being kidnapped and held for ransom in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
... that when actress Joanna Lumley spent nine days on an uninhabited island for the 1994 TV show Girl Friday, she made a pair of shoes out of her bra?
... that John Wilson was expelled from the Arkansas House of Representatives for killing another representative in a knife fight, but was then re-elected two years later?

Picture Of The Day

The Heart Nebula is an emission nebula, 7500 light years from Earth, located in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. Spanning almost 2 degrees in the sky, its shape is driven by stellar winds from the hot stars in its core. The nebula displays glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes, and is also made up of ionised oxygen and sulfur gasses, which cause rich blue and orange colours to be seen in narrowband images. This photograph of the Heart Nebula, with the Fish Head Nebula also visible in the top right corner, is a narrowband image captured on a 70mm scope with a capture period of around 44 hours.

Photograph credit: Ram Samudrala

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Featured List

SZA

The discography of SZA, an American singer-songwriter, includes two studio albums, three extended plays (EPs), one live album, and forty-four singles, as of 2024. After self-releasing her first two EPs, SZA signed to the record label Top Dawg Entertainment, under which she released her 2017 debut studio album, Ctrl. The album peaked at number three in the United States Billboard 200, charted there for more than five years, and earned SZA some of her first Grammy nominations in 2018. After a five-year wait, during which SZA appeared in three top-10 collaborations, she released SOS, her second studio album. It became SZA's first number-one album in several countries, was the US's third best-selling album of 2023, and spawned "Kill Bill", the third-best-selling single of the year worldwide. SZA's next projects are a deluxe edition of SOS and her third studio album, Lana. Ctrl and SOS have been ranked by Rolling Stone as among the 500 greatest albums of all time. (Full list...)