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● US actor Henry Fonda was born in 1905. He is remembered for his performance in The Grapes of Wrath 1940.

● The Oscars were presented in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA in 1929.

● National Independence Day in Norway, commemorating the introduction of constitutional government in 1814. The country had been transferred from Danish to Swedish control in January 1814, but it did not achieve full independence from Sweden until October 1905.

● English physician and pioneer of vaccination, Edward Jenner, was born in 1749.

● In 1992, the Government Team of the Jaume I University in Castelló de la Plana decided to name Doctor Honoris Causa, his Excellency Don Vicente Sos Baynat.

●The IES Ribalta (Castelló) paid homage to Don Vicente Sos Baynat in1983.

● NATO was established as permanent defence organization in 1950.

● Napoleon I was proclaimed emperor of France in 1804. ● International Museum Day. This day is an occasion to raise awareness on how important museums are in the development of society. The theme for 2012 is Museums in a Changing World. New Challenges, New Inspirations.

● The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gone with the Wind, by US author Margaret Mitchell was published in 1936.

● A birthday salute to US President JF Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, New York. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe´s song of Happy Birthday in 1962.

● French novelist Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799, one of the founders of realism in European Literature. La Comédie Humaine is a series of books where he portrayed the French society after the fall of Napoleon.

● Charles Lindberg set off from New York on the first non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. He arrived in Paris the next day, after a 33 ½ -hour crossing.

● FIFA, the International Football Federation, was founded in Paris in 1904.

● Elton John played the first of a series of concerts in Leningrad and Moscow, becoming the first Western rock star to play in the USSR in 1979.

● German composer Richard Wagner was born in 1813. Scottish writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859. He was famous for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, a major innovation in the field of crime fiction.

● World Biodiversity Day for promotion of biodiversity issues.

● French patriot Joan of Arc was captured and sold to the English in 1430. The court convicted her of heresy and was burned at the stake by the English when she was nineteen years old. Twenty four years later the Vatican found her innocent and declared her a martyr.

● Netherlands declared independent from Spain in 1568.

● Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman), American singer, songwriter, musician and poet, was born in 1941.Some of his songs as Blowing in the Wind became theme songs of the anti-war and civil rights movementin the 1960s.

● Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus died in 1543. He formulated a heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the centre of the Universe.

● On this day in 1895, the Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde was found guilty of homesexual offences and sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Jail. ● The first Star Wars film, directed by George Lucas was released in 1977.

● William Knox D’ Arcy made the first commercial discovery of oil in the Middle East, now Iran in 1908. In April the following year the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded, later to become British Petroleum (BP).

●The first Le Mans 24-hour motor race was held in France in 1923.

● German born American politician, Henry Alfred Kissinger, was born in 1923. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. He served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon administration.

● Richard Drew received a patent for cellophane adhesive tape in 1930.

● Feast day of St Bernard of Menthon, patron saint of mountaineers,after whom the St Bernard dog is named.

● In 1982 Pope John Paul II made the first papal visit to the UK since 1531.

● Spanish composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz was born in 1860. Born in Camprodon, Catalonia,was a child prodigy who first performed at the age of four. His most famous work was Iberia (1908). Cecilia Sarkozy, the former wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is the geat-granddaughter of Isaac Albéniz.

● Edmund Hillary, New Zealand mountaineer and Tenzing Norgay, Nepalese mountaineer reached the summit of Mt Everest in 1953.

● Christopher Columbus set sail on his third voyage, which would take him to South America in 1948.

● English dramatist Christopher Marlowe died in 1593. He was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian before William Shakespeare.

● Big Ben, the famous bell in the clock tower of the House of Commons, rang for the first time in 1859.

● World No Tobacco Day.The World Health Organisation created this day in 1987. It draws global attention to the smoking epidemic and to the preventable death and disease it causes.