Beta Tools Speed Up's Spanish rider Alonso Lopez crashes out in the early stages of the Moto2 race at the MotoGP Australian Grand Prix in Phillip Island on October 22, 2023. (Photo by Paul Crock/AFP Photo)

Palestinians react at the site of an Israeli strike on a house, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on October 24, 2023. (Photo by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)

Artists perform during the traditional costume parade during the 190th edition of the Oktoberfest beer festival in Munich, southern Germany on September 21, 2025. The world's biggest beer festival Oktoberfest runs until October 5, 2025. (Photo by Michaela Stache/AFP Photo)

“Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Nicknamed the “Bronze Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, and even the “Créole Goddess” in anglophone nations.

Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture and to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, but turned it down), for assisting the French Resistance during World War II and for being the first American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre”.

Photo: American entertainer Josephine Baker in costume for her famous “banana dance”. Baker was an overnight sensation when she arrived in Paris in the mid-1920s. (Photo by Walery/Getty Images)

Indonesian mahouts clean their Sumatran elephant in a river near the zoo in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, 12 December 2014. According media reports, the smallest of the Asian elephants, Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatrensis) is facing serious pressures arising from illegal logging and associated habitat loss and fragmentation in Indonesia. The population has come under increasing threat from rapid forest conversion to plantations. (Photo by Dedi Sahputra/EPA)

A woman walks past a caricature of Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in east London, Britain November 18, 2016. (Photo by Andrew Winning/Reuters)

Bride Katty Malang Mikunug with friends, takes a photo before the wedding on October 21, 2017 in Saguiaran in Lanao del Sur, southern Philippines. Paulo Mamayo Ambor, 22, a resident of Marawi who got displaced by the fighting between government troops and IS-inspired militants, weds Katty Malang Mikunug, 22, a resident of an adjacent town in Saguiaran. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte declared Marawi liberated, following the death of Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon and one of the Maute brothers, Omar Maute, after nearly five months of fierce urban battle inside the besieged city. The fighting started May 23, and left more than 1,000 people dead, whilst displacing at least 400,000 people. (Photo by Jes Aznar/Getty Images)

A massive, 8 metre tall sculpture of Marilyn Monroe, frozen with her dress blowing up, was on display at a shopping mall in downtown Dalian city, northeast China's Liaoning province, on Tuesday, November 14, 2017. The sculpture is a replica of Seward Johnson's Forever Marilyn in Chicago. (Photo by Imagine China/Rex Features/Shutterstock)