It is the 181st day of the year. We celebrate Saint Martial, who was bishop of Limoges in the third century. Today, the weather is stormy in the southeastern part of France.
What is the saying of the day?
"When in June we see its end, Saint-Martial often washes the way."
What happened on June 30?
- 1859: Frenchman Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a cable stretched between the two banks
- 1908: The Tunguska meteorite, estimated at 40,000 tons, digs more than 200 craters and destroys 60 km2 of forests, near Lake Baikal in Siberia
- 1956: introduction of the car vignette to feed the National Old Age Fund
- 1968: legislative elections with Gaullist tidal wave
- 1973: Longest total solar eclipse of the century (6 min 20 s)
- 1988: Schism within the Catholic Church. Bishop Lefèbvre is excommunicated after consecrating four bishops
- 1991: Official end of the apartheid system in South Africa
- 2009: death of German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch
- 2012: UNESCO inscribes the French mining basin of Nord-Pas-de-Calais as a World Heritage Site
- 2015: Clocks around the world pause between 23:59:59 and 00:00:00 (GMT). This leap second makes it possible to connect the legal time to the irregular "astronomical" time related to the rotation of the Earth
- 2017: death of Simone Veil, a great figure in political life, survivor of the Holocaust, who had carried the French law legalizing abortion in 1974. "My claim as a woman is that my difference is taken into account, that I am not forced to adapt to the male model," she said.
- 2019: Donald Trump becomes the first US president to set foot on North Korean soil, during a meeting with Kim Jong Un in the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas
Who was born on June 30?
- Jean-Yves Le Drian, politician born in 1947
- Alain Finkielkraut, academician born in 1949. "Silence is dying, noise is taking power everywhere; it is the only ecological calamity that no one is talking about," he told Libération in January 2000.
- Mike Tyson (born 1966), American former boxer
- Emmanuel Mouret, film director born in 1970