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A Cromwell tank wrecked at 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 titles 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's first crewed flight carries 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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Today's featured picture

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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