Foreign Affairs A Shift in Defense Burden Would Help Europe, Not Just the U.S. The fact is that American strength alone cannot keep the continent safe. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Prompted by this week’s NATO summit in Washington, much of the discussion in American defense circles will focus on comparing levels of military aid to Ukraine—and encouraging Europeans to spend more on their own defense. For those in the American conservative movement who want the U.S. to focus more on the Indo-Pacific, these are important conversations. Those in this camp should continue emphasizing the importance of meeting (if not exceeding) the 2 percent minimum spending requirement for NATO members, and urge Europeans to take the lead on supporting Ukraine.  Further, Americans who champion a shift to the Indo-Pacific should be encouraging Europeans to take primary responsibility for their own defense. These Europeans should be looking for ways to shift the burden from the U.S. military to European militaries—and soon—as a way of freeing up American resources to deter China. Germany has announced that it will be establishing a permanently stationed brigade in Lithuania by 2027 (as opposed to bases with a rotating presence). The base will be modeled after American bases in Germany, with housing for soldiers and their families and base amenities. This sends a clear message in terms of commitment to the defense of the Baltics by NATO and should be applauded. Estonia and Latvia deserve similar reassurances. European countries could send a real message that they are taking primary responsibility for the security by establishing permanent bases in Estonia and Latvia the same way Germany is in Lithuania (with the approval and coordination of the host governments, of course). In all cases, the focus should be on moving combat power to the Baltics as quickly as possible to provide reassurance and deterrence in the Baltics. Even within supranational constructs like the European Union or NATO, the interests of nation-states play a role. Italy is never going to be as invested in protecting NATO’s eastern flank as Poland is. Individual NATO members should play to their strengths in a complementary manner, with Mediterranean countries like Italy, France, and Greece using their navies to police the Red Sea and Mediterranean, by both preventing attacks on shipping and targeting the Houthis disrupting commerce. The French, Italians, and Greeks all have substantial fleets and an interest in safeguarding the trade route leading to Europe through the Red Sea. Yet the United States is currently taking the lead on bombing the Houthis in Yemen, using munitions it desperately needs to conserve for the Indo-Pacific. The United States does not need to lead efforts in every security concern. In fact, Americans should encourage Europeans to take the initiative in security issues that are of secondary or tertiary importance to the United States. For example, Portugal conducts partner-building exercises and counter-narcotics and counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Guinea. Portugal, with its unique history in the region, its understanding of the players and issues—and its access to bases—is uniquely situated to conduct operations in the Gulf of Guinea. The United States can act as an enabler in a limited capacity if there are available resources, but should encourage Portugal to assume the central role in the region. Europeans can also take over the mission in Kosovo (KFOR) by providing either the overwhelming majority or the entirety of the force stationed at Camp Bondsteel. U.S. Secretary of the Army Christine E. Wormuth herself recently floated the idea of dramatically reducing the American presence in Kosovo as a way of freeing up personnel and funding for more critical missions elsewhere. The mission in Kosovo has been static for decades. Europeans are more than capable of handling it with little or no additional resources provided by the U.S. The U.S. will also continue to act as a key enabler in certain sensing and air defense missions for some time while Europeans develop their own capabilities—ideally sped up through increased tech sharing and weapons sales approved by the Department of State for transfer to NATO allies. By taking on these additional roles, Europeans can free up American forces and resources to focus on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, the U.S. will maintain existing capabilities in Europe and provide critical enabling capabilities to the European forces providing the bulk of conventional deterrence in Europe. The post A Shift in Defense Burden Would Help Europe, Not Just the U.S. appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Deep State’s 60-Year War on Black Americans—and the 2024 Populist Opportunity  There are real reasons to believe that black Americans are ready to break with the left. Credit: David McNew/Getty Images This past spring, at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black, all-men’s college at the heart of the city which delivered Georgia to Democrats in 2020, President Biden gave a highly publicized commencement address on the themes of “manhood” and democracy. This speech was widely interpreted, along with political and symbolic moves involving menthol cigarettes and state dinners, as signaling a renewed Democratic focus on black Americans after two years of diminished attention: a “testament to the centrality and urgency of [the Party] consolidating support [among]…and…mobilizing Black voters.” Today, this centrality can only have increased: As questions about Biden’s political viability appear to be paralyzing the Democratic Party, ensuring the turnout of one of its most reliable voting blocs is more crucial than ever before. Yet neither the current Democratic president nor his Party writ large are allies to the black community on questions of manhood or democracy. From the 1970s to the 1990s, as a senator from Delaware, Biden himself was crucial in promoting legislation expanding national government power in the name of fighting a “war on crime” that sent black men to prison and broke black communal and political life. In 2020, the progressive left and the New York Times criticized him for this record. But neither activists nor institutionalists took its full measure, which amounts to a startling indictment of both Democrats and the national institutions they have strengthened for 60 years.  The War on Crime that Biden along with establishment Democrats and neoconservative Republicans backed between 1970 and the 2010s was not just a policy agenda or a publicity play, featuring at least nine bills passed to the self-generating political acclaim that greets the perception of a problem being solved in Washington, D.C. From its inception in the 1960s by academics and policymakers in the Kennedy Administration, it served as the punitive part of a broader project: the white-collar institutionalizing of American life at the expense of the laborers and associations that shaped this country’s politics from the War for Independence through the Civil Rights movement. In the process of this project’s development, race moved from being an issue to a marker. In the Eighties and the Nineties, it was used to rack up political points for toughness against “hard-core” youth or “super-predators.” In the 2000s and 2010s and after, it was used to police the language of opposing politicians and silence anti-Washington dissent in the name of fighting racism and then “white nationalism.”  All the while, the situation of black Americans declined from a peak of political and economic empowerment in 1970, as they saw their positions undermined by the white-collarizing agenda of establishment Washington. The reality of this shift, the slow erosion of on-the-ground communities by centralizing institutions, has been obscured by political rhetoric. But its broad outlines should be familiar to populist Republicans who have stood up for displaced white working class voters and are increasingly interested in arguing that President Trump’s attack on Washington power structures will benefit the black community.  The specific history of this shift, which has not been set out, provides populist Republicans with powerful ammunition to make their case. It also builds new links from the black working class to the white working class. Not only did national policies affect both groups in the same ways over time, but Washington’s mobilization against inner-city black Americans from the 1960s to the 2000s was a template for its mobilization against white populist Americans beginning in the 2010s.  The War on Crime, the first major “use” of the black community by establishment Washington, grew from a problem Washington itself created in the 1940s. Black Americans urged North by the government to produce the armaments to fight World War II had been reduced by locally restrictive laws to living in ghettos while being shut out of factory work after the war. In one sense, aspects of this issue were already being addressed, since laboring jobs were opening up to black men thanks to the Civil Rights Act pushed on the reluctant administration by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). What’s more, decades-old local voluntary organizations founded by black Americans in places like New York’s Lower East Side were helping prevent delinquency there, replaying a tradition of on-the-ground associating alive in the republic since the early 1800s.  But the administration was determined to address the problem it had identified, and its angle was altogether more top-down and abstract. It aimed to prepare black Americans for integration in an essentially white collar labor force with seminars on “items like smiling and Emotional Maturity” delivered by “well-adjusted, middle-class professionals” who bragged of achievements like creating “a middle class environment in a slum neighborhood school.” In the view of one perceptive observer, these government-funded, university-educated social workers imported to neighborhoods like Harlem and Watts “seem to be smiling themselves out of any meaningful communication with their poor.”  The Kennedy-Johnson administrations’ response was part of a bigger, less publicized, power-oriented push by academics, consultants, and administrators to move America from a blue collar economy dependent on states and localities to a white collar one directed by national institutions, in the name of diversity, efficiency and progress. It was a far more aggressive continuation of the agenda that had begun with the rise of the administrative state after 1945 and its funding of corporations and universities to fight the Cold War. After the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, it would be adopted with different emphases by the Republican neoconservatives and Democratic neoliberals who dominated much of each party until the 2010s. Its policies included outsourcing union jobs to Mexico in the name of public health and education; attacking union corruption in the service of clean government; and “white-collarizing” “left behind” groups like blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and rural whites in the name of “civilization.”  But there was another side to this program. Those members of the “left behind,” particularly urban blacks, who didn’t adjust their values and their lives were labeled “hard-core” reprobates and subjected to the increasingly heavy stick of nationalized, militarized law enforcement.  This stick was embedded in the legislation that deployed the missionaries of emotional maturity to Watts, Detroit, the Bronx, and elsewhere, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965, as well as the Safe Streets Act of 1968. According to scholar Elizabeth Hinton in her recent book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, the acts mandated that, to receive funding, “employment initiatives, public schools, and grassroots organizations [would] partner with juvenile courts, police departments, and correctional facilities,” in a schema in which police officers were the “frontline soldiers” of a “war on crime.” They also, in Hinton’s recounting, “made tens of millions of dollars available to public organizations, private companies, and individual researchers who could develop technology, hardware, and theories that would help the federal government prevent future crime.” Not surprisingly, “consulting firms and corporations emerged to reap the benefits of such funding” and “the result was widespread corruption,” creating a number of Washington-linked players with interests in continuing what fast became an anti-crime boondoggle. During the 1970s, this fallout from this boondoggle fell disproportionately on black men being laid off thanks to labor outsourcing: last hired after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and thus first fired as blue collar jobs diminished. Abandonment of families became some of these men’s retreat, in a direct replay of non-earning white men during the Great Depression, and petty crime or drug trafficking eventually became their commerce of last resort. This wasn’t a new phenomenon in America: in the early 1900s, hard-luck Irish, Italians and Jews had joined the mafia in cities where law enforcement was discerning about the laws it enforced. But seven decades later helicopters and militarized police made neighborhoods into war zones and discernment a thing of the past, eradicating the slow path to respectability that earlier generations of minorities had enjoyed under state and city governments.  The result was a Washington-created problem that Washington politicians continued to gain political capital from purporting to solve. This meant a series of bills passed in the 1980s and 1990s to combat what neoconservatives like President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general called “urban terrorism” and neoliberals like Hillary Clinton called “super-predators” who had to be brought “to heel.” Fronted by formerly segregationist senators like James Eastland and Strom Thurmond, members of a dying political breed who occupied powerful congressional committee posts, these Washington initiatives framed policies that expanded national power as parts of a war against immoral opponents which brooked no middle ground. Not coincidentally, this was exactly the rhetoric that would be used to justify the government boondoggle that became the war on terror in the 2000s, and was supported by many of the same players. Rather than solving the underlying problems plaguing the black community, these national expansions increased them. Some legislative provisions allowed local police forces to access information, air surveillance, equipment and training from defense and intelligence agencies and the military. This created fields of “urban surveillance” and “social control,” which further alienated the people living inside them. Other provisions allowed juveniles to be tried as adults as well as introducing mandatory minimums for possession of small amounts of crack cocaine even as possession of powder cocaine, used by middle class whites driving the demand for drugs, was punished less severely. Still others provided states with funds for prison construction, creating the incentive to continue arrests in pursuit of federal funds.  The effect of these policies was predictable. Between 1980 and 1997, the numbers of people serving prison time for non-violent drug offenses went from 50,000 to 400,000 people, disproportionately low income black users or dealers. Between 1995 and 2005 the incarceration rate rose from 411 people per 100,000 to 491, with black inmates representing 40 percent of inmates with a sentence of more than one year. This “boom” also gave low-level, unsteady employment as prison guards to black women, many of them single mothers, now supervising the black men the government had drained of working dignity and then put away. Meanwhile, communities these men left behind became “opportunity deserts” off the steady stream of drugs, incarceration, outsourced labor and union decline. In this sense, they were later-stage versions of those white working class communities soon to be mobilized by Trump. During this time, a small number of black Americans gained access to institutional power at the hands of the Democratic Party, which used this shift to move race from an issue of law and order to one of identity politics. The Johnson Administration had begun the process, but it was the next eight-year Democratic presidency, of Bill Clinton, when the push began in earnest. The Democrats’ 1992 platform stated that “as the party of inclusion, we take special pride in our country’s emergence as the world’s largest and most successful multiethnic, multiracial republic.” And in 1993, the incoming Democratic president set a record for Black appointees in his cabinet. By 2000, African Americans were an unprecedented 14 percent of the Administration’s appointments and more African American judges had been appointed than ever before. This push continued during the Obama presidency, and was presented as an explicit part of the progressive promise of American life.  But, in practice, the main political function of race became language policing the other side, as “racist” increasingly replaced “hard-core” and “super-predator” as “the” establishment term of moral condemnation. Some of this language policing found its way into status-quo politicking: the Daily Show featuring recordings of racist private calls or establishment papers featuring accusations of implicit racism. Other policing created a new boondoggle around the threat of “white nationalism” not much different than the one around the threat of “urban terrorism” and Muslim terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s.  This boondoggle involved nonprofits such as the Southern Poverty Law Center establishing Washington administrative connections, then using their authority to label small government activists as harborers of racial animus: immoral opponents whose wrongdoing, per what was now the standard rhetorical construct, brooked no compromise. Not coincidentally, the same players who backed the wars on crime and terror, from Attorney General Merrick Garland, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Clinton Administration, to former George W. Bush Administration officials Frances Townsend and Liz Cheney, supported these moves as well.  All the while, the operators driving this policing were profiting off the black community in obvious ways. Hollywood producers like David Geffen who in the 1990s helped solidify the new Democratic Party of corporations, nonprofits, and racial sensitivity also profited off of mainstreaming hip hop: turning music expressing the reality of survival in vacuumed-out communities into an opportunity for white suburban high schoolers to wear their pants down. Neoconservatives like George W. Bush, who boasted of purging their party of racism, turbo-charged the outsourcing that was putting paid to black working life. Financiers like Herb Sandler who poured their fortunes into progressive nonprofits made those fortunes off the home ownership boondoggle, which increasingly targeted blacks and led to a mean wealth loss for black families of 31 to 34 percent after the implosion of 2008.  Matters have not improved since this insider club became explicitly multiracial after 2008. Democratic officials like Kamala Harris, who started their careers pushing tough-on-crime policies in their ground zero, California, have nonetheless run on racial identity while also allowing a potentially lasting electoral realignment based on demographic shifts off of unauthorized immigrants, at the expense of black Americans. Biden-linked operators like John Podesta pushing to secure voting rights for felons, many black, spent years supporting policies that eroded black communities and sending them to prison, seeding a new kind of political harvest: break lives, create dependency, answer a need, get the votes.  Caught between these shifts at the top and their consequences at the bottom are black Americans who have embraced the institutional promise, and not for power or publicity or political gain. These accomplished professionals try to bring the reality of black life on the ground to the attention of the establishment, but the effects of their insights and efforts seem limited. One of them is Princeton University Professor of African American Studies Eddie Glaude, who wrote in 2016 that the idea “that you can have black leaders representing the interests of all black people but who are not accountable to black constituents kills black democratic life.” It also “undermines mechanisms of accountability as black elites broker on behalf of black people whose interests are, so it is claimed, readily identifiable.”  Another is Pantheon Books’ former publisher, Lisa Lucas, who used the progressive emphasis on race in the 2010s and 2020s to put black life in America in new perspectives. This year, after a raft of resignations of black women executives, during a period when establishment players quietly moved race to the back of their playboard, Lucas was let go without warning, to the outspoken chagrin of the authors she had found. The day of her firing, she posted on X, mostly humorously, but also about the system which had invited her in then unceremoniously dropped her. Responding to a supportive tweet, “We all need you to end up in books,” she tweeted back, “This is up to corporate publishing and exactly five CEOS,” e.g. an industry driven towards bottom-line conglomeration by the same people purportedly supporting independent black writers inside it. At another point in the day, she tweeted, “In 2024, race is irrelevant. I’m learning the news!”  In this context, of an establishment for which race has existed for 60 years as a political marker, a populist movement helmed by an unlikely leader has an unusual opportunity. On an empirical read of the evidence, the three forces that have affected the black community most profoundly since 1970 are outsourcing, the war on crime, and the decline of on-the-ground political power at the hands of unaccountable institutions. All three of these underlying structural issues are ones that Trump’s Republicans have addressed or are in the process of addressing.  Because outsourcing has done so much harm to the white working class voters who vote Republican, Trump’s party has done more to reestablish a push for blue collar work than any movement since before World War II. His party is also more accountable to popular voices on the ground, many of them religious, than any since the Republicans of the 1960s and 1970s, during Barry Goldwater’s and Ronald Reagan’s rise. Finally, it was Trump who, in 2018, took the biggest step to unwind the Washington-backed carceral state since its foundations were laid by the Kennedy-Johnson Administration 50 years before: reviving congressional progress on and then signing the First Step Act, which “combin[ed] new funding for anti-recidivism programs, the expansion of early-release credits for prisoners and the reduction of certain mandatory minimum sentences.”  Any effort to make these points about contemporary Republicanism will come up against Democratic claims about helping black Americans fight racist roads and voting laws; and championing affirmative action and black-owned businesses via funds from Washington. Yet these Democratic emblems of progress exist within the construct of an expanding national state helmed by educated administrators, and it’s this construct that has created most of the problems faced by black Americans today.  It’s also this construct that contemporary “Main Street” conservatism under Trump seeks to unwind, and, on this standard, the Republican Party has a real chance to appeal to a new constituency. At the very least, if a basic question in politics is ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Republicans can make the case that the Democratic project with black Americans since 1965 is less beneficial, and more insidiously harmful, than it might at first appear. The post The Deep State’s 60-Year War on Black Americans—and the 2024 Populist Opportunity appeared first on The American Conservative.

Yesterday Nature published an article summarising what countries are doing to prepare for a bird flu pandemic.  Wealthy nations are purchasing vaccines against H5N1 influenza and boosting surveillance. Nature expressed no concern […]

from SGT Report: Did you the DemonRats in California are actively trying to block a new Bill (SB 1414) that would make it a felony to SELL CHILDREN FOR SEX. By the way, how is that not a felony already? These are Luucifer’s minions. Author TM Ballantyne, Jr. joins me to discuss. Dr. Gundry has […]

by Leo Hohmann, Leo Hohmann: President Joe Biden made a lot of embarrassing gaffes in his so-called “Big Boy press conference” last night, Thursday, July 11, including his referral to Donald Trump as his vice president. Earlier in the day he had referred to Ukraine’s illegitimate (unelected) dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin.” But he […]

A Prayer to Be Welcoming at ChurchBy Emma Danzey "Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” – Romans 15:7 Have you ever been invited into Christian community? It is so refreshing to feel accepted and welcomed. When people go out of their way to say hi, introduce themselves, and connect, it means a lot. It can be easy over time when we become comfortable in our current community and neglect to see others who are nearby as well. We can become routine in our church circles and forget the calling as Christians to love and welcome new people. It is easy to do, and we all have to ask the Holy Spirit to check our hearts and reveal sin in our lives. He will convict and gently lead us to love others around us better. I love how Romans 15:7 tells us to welcome others as Christ has welcomed us. Jesus is always our example and role model. We were sinners who He could have ignored but He chose to love us. We welcome others for the glory of God. It honors the Lord when we take the time to get to know others and love them well. We should take special thought as well to those who are different from us. James 2 teaches us to show no partiality. We are called to show kindness to others, and our friendship should extend to a variety of people. Matthew 22:36-39 says, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: "‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Loving God and loving people are the greatest commandments. When we welcome others, we love them. The best part is that we can often end up making wonderful new friends who teach us more about God. We were created to pray for each other, encourage each other, and share our hardships with each other. This has to start somewhere. Let’s pray: Dear Jesus,Thank You for the gift of community. Thank you for helping us by Your Spirit to get to know new faces and people around us we do not know. Help us to be motivated to seek out relationships with others in our church communities. We pray against the sinful decisions to isolate and ignore. We pray for confidence to reach out and love others with our words and actions. We confess where we have been cliquey and selfish. Forgive us for making "our" churches and neglecting Your church. Help us to reach out and see You at work. Enable us to have open hearts. Please help us not to show partiality or favoritism. Help us remember that we are all one in Christ Jesus. Thank you, Jesus, for welcoming us and helping us to live out of gratitude for Your hospitality. Open our hearts to have the willingness to get to know others as brothers and sisters. Open the door to new friendships that are founded on you and prayer.  Lord, thank you for the people who have welcomed us into community. We celebrate Your goodness in providing friendships in our lives. Thank you for that one person who was kind enough to say hello. Empower us to meet one new person at church this week and even every week from here on out. Help us go the extra mile and get numbers or meet for coffee. Lead us into creative ways to have community. Lord, You say that everyone is not a hand and that being the body means there is value in different parts. Help us to see that when we get to know others we get to be a better picture of what You intended for us to be. We were not meant to be alone; we were made for this. Help us to fight the enemy and our flesh that would tell us otherwise and choose to welcome others around us. Help this not to be an individual effort, but a church-wide movement to multiply and grow. In Your name, Jesus, Amen. Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/PixelCatchers Emma Danzey's mission in life stems from Ephesians 3:20-21, to embrace the extraordinary. One of her greatest joys is to journey with the Lord in His Scriptures. She is wife to Drew and mom to Graham. Emma serves alongside her husband in ministry, she focuses most of her time in the home, but loves to provide articles on the Bible, life questions, and Christian lifestyle. Her article on Interracial Marriage was the number 1 on Crosswalk in 2021. Most recently, Emma released Treasures for Tots, (Scripture memory songs) and multiple books and devotionals for young children. During her ministry career, Emma has released Wildflower: Blooming Through Singleness, two worship EP albums, founded and led Polished Conference Ministries, and ran the Refined Magazine. You can view her articles on her blog at emmadanzey.wordpress.com and check out her Instagram @Emmadanzey. Related Resource: Remember God’s Enduring Love for You in this Guided Meditation on Psalm 100! This guided Christian meditation from Psalm 100 will help you experience and praise God for his unending love for you. Become aware of God's presence with you, and praise God for his loyal and enduring love from the beginning of time and into the future. Listen to every episode of the So Much More Podcast on LifeAudio.com, or subscribe on Apple or Spotify so you never miss an episode! Now that you’ve prayed, are you in need of someone to pray for YOU? Click the button below! Visit iBelieve.com for more inspiring prayer content. The post A Prayer to Be Welcoming at Church – Your Daily Prayer – July 13 appeared first on GodUpdates.

1865 - P. T. Barnum's museum in New York burns down, giantess Anna Haining Swan just escapes 1923 - American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews discovers the first recognised dinosaur eggs, in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia 1936 - 112°F (44°C), Mio, Michigan (state record) 1973 - Bobby Murcer's 3 homers accounted for all RBIs, beating KC 5-0 1987 - Kylie Minogue releases her debut single "Locomotion" 1994 - Former NFL running back, broadcaster and actor O.J. Simpson (charged with murder) gives hair samples for testing 2011 - Mumbai is rocked by three bomb blasts during the evening rush hour, killing 26 and injuring 130 2017 - US President Donald Trump arrives in Paris for a 2-day visit with French President Emmanuel Macron 2018 - Large protests in London against US President Donald Trump featuring Trump-like baby blimp as President Trump meets Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle 2019 - After Atlantic League-MLB partnership rule changes, Southern Maryland Blue Crabs' outfielder Tony Thomas becomes first player in professional baseball history to steal first base in 7-2 win v Lancaster Barnstormers More Historical Events »

Historical Events 1854 - US forces shell and burn San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua 1896 - Philadelphia outfielder Ed Delahanty becomes second major leaguer to hit 4 HRs in a game as Phillies lose 9-8 to Chicago Colts at the West Side Grounds, Chicago 1911 - Great Britain and Japan renew their alliance of 1902 for another four years; the reason Japan joins WWI on the Allies side 1955 - Beaux Arts Trio (Menahem Pressler, piano; Daniel Guilet, violin; Bernard Greenhouse, cello) makes their debut at the Berkshire Music Festival (now Tanglewood Music Center), Lenox, Massachusetts, United States 1960 - US Democratic convention nominates JFK as presidential candidate 1984 - British guitarist Jeff Beck quits singer Rod Stewart's tour after 7 shows More Historical Events » Famous Birthdays 1826 - Stanislao Cannizzaro, Italian chemist (Reaction of Cannizzaro), born in Palermo, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (d. 1910) 1922 - Ken Mosdell, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2006) 1932 - Per Nørgård, Danish composer (Papalagi; Babette's Feast), born in Gentofte, Denmark 1948 - Ronald Machtley, American politician (Rep-R-Rhode Island), born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1954 - Ray "Candles" Bright, Australian cricket slow-left armer (1977-86) 1956 - Janet Yang, American film producer (The Joy Luck Club) and 1st Asian American President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, born in New York City More Famous Birthdays » Famous Deaths 1889 - Carli Zoeller, German composer, dies at 49 1936 - Izydor Lotto, composer, dies at 91 1997 - Alexandra Danilova, Russian-American ballerina (The Turning Point), dies at 92 1997 - Miguel Ángel Blanco, Spanish politician (b. 1968) 2013 - Laurie Ann Frink, American big band jazz trumpeter and educator, dies of cancer at 61 2015 - Gerhard Zwerenz, German writer and politician, dies at 90 More Famous Deaths »