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William Edward Sanders (1883–1917) was a New Zealand recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC), the highest British and Commonwealth combat award for gallantry. He took up a seafaring career in 1899 and earned a master's certificate in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. He served on troopships until April 1916, when he was commissioned in the Royal Naval Reserve. He was appointed second in command of Helgoland, a Q-ship operating against German submarines. He was given his own command, HMS Prize, in February 1917. Sanders was awarded the VC for his actions while on his first patrol as captain, when Prize engaged and drove off a German U-boat that had attacked and damaged the ship. He was killed in action when Prize was sunk by a U-boat on her fourth patrol. His VC is currently held by the Auckland War Memorial Museum. His memorials include the Sanders Cup, a sailing trophy for 14-foot (4.3 m) yachts. (Full article...)

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Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum

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In the news

Herat earthquakes aftermath

Three earthquakes (aftermath pictured) leave more than 2,700 people dead in Herat, Afghanistan.
Kelvin Kiptum breaks the men's marathon world record in the Chicago Marathon.
In motorsport, Max Verstappen wins the Formula One World Championship.
Israel declares a state of war after Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launch a series of attacks from the Gaza Strip that has left hundreds dead.

On this day

October 11: Feast day of Saint James the Deacon (Anglicanism); National Coming Out Day

Main Quadrangle of the University of Sydney

1311 – The peerage and clergy of the Kingdom of England published the Ordinances of 1311 to restrict King Edward II's powers.
1852 – The University of Sydney (pictured), Australia's oldest university, was inaugurated two years after being established by the University of Sydney Act.
1865 – The Morant Bay rebellion, led by Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, began in Jamaica; after protestors burned down the courthouse, it was brutally suppressed by Governor Edward John Eyre.
1937 – Edward, Duke of Windsor, and Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, arrived at Berlin Friedrichstraße station to begin a tour of Nazi Germany, where they were greeted by Nazi salutes and dined with high-ranking members of the state apparatus.
1973 – Typhoon Nora, the fourth-most intense tropical cyclone on record, dissipated after killing 40 people and leaving more than a million homeless across Taiwan and the Philippines.

Huldrych Zwingli (d. 1531)
Casimir Pulaski (d. 1779)
Jean Alexander (b. 1926)
Sawao Katō (b. 1946)

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Today's featured picture

AG Carinae is a luminous blue variable star in the constellation Carina. It is one of the most luminous stars in the Milky Way, although its great distance from Earth (20,000 light-years) and intervening interstellar dust mean that the star is not usually visible to the naked eye; its apparent brightness varies erratically between magnitude 5.7 and 9.0. Apparently in a transitional phase between a massive class-O blue supergiant and a Wolf–Rayet star, AG Carinae is highly unstable and suffers from erratic pulsations, occasional larger outbursts, and rare massive eruptions. The star is surrounded by a nebula of ejected material at a distance of 0.4 to 1.2 parsecs (1.3 to 3.9 light-years). The nebula contains around 15 solar masses of material, all lost from the star around 10,000 years ago. This photograph of AG Carinae and its surrounding nebula was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2021, as one of its anniversary images.

Photograph credit: NASA, ESA and the Space Telescope Science Institute

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