PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Newly married and sworn as a Naval officer, Jimmy Carter left his tiny hometown in 1946 hoping to climb the ranks and see the world. Less than a decade later, the death of his father and namesake, a merchant farmer and local politician who went by “Mr. Earl,” prompted the submariner and his wife, Rosalynn, to return to the rural life of Plains, Georgia, they thought they’d escaped. The lieutenant never would be an admiral. Instead, he became commander in chief. Years after his presidency ended in humbling defeat, he would add a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded not for his White House accomplishments but “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The life of James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th and longest-lived U.S. president, ended Sunday at the age of 100 where it began: Plains, the town of 600 that fueled his political rise, welcomed him after his fall and sustained him during 40 years of service that redefined what it means to be a former president. With the stubborn confidence of an engineer and an optimism rooted in his Baptist faith, Carter described his motivations in politics and beyond in the same way: an almost missionary zeal to solve problems and improve lives. Carter was raised amid racism, abject poverty and hard rural living — realities that shaped both his deliberate politics and emphasis on human rights. “He always felt a responsibility to help people,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend of Carter's in Plains. “And when he couldn’t make change wherever he was, he decided he had to go higher.” Carter's path, a mix of happenstance and calculation , pitted moral imperatives against political pragmatism; and it defied typical labels of American politics, especially caricatures of one-term presidents as failures. “We shouldn’t judge presidents by how popular they are in their day. That's a very narrow way of assessing them," Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Associated Press. “We should judge them by how they changed the country and the world for the better. On that score, Jimmy Carter is not in the first rank of American presidents, but he stands up quite well.” Later in life, Carter conceded that many Americans, even those too young to remember his tenure, judged him ineffective for failing to contain inflation or interest rates, end the energy crisis or quickly bring home American hostages in Iran. He gained admirers instead for his work at The Carter Center — advocating globally for public health, human rights and democracy since 1982 — and the decades he and Rosalynn wore hardhats and swung hammers with Habitat for Humanity. Yet the common view that he was better after the Oval Office than in it annoyed Carter, and his allies relished him living long enough to see historians reassess his presidency. “He doesn’t quite fit in today’s terms” of a left-right, red-blue scoreboard, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the former president multiple times during his own White House bid. At various points in his political career, Carter labeled himself “progressive” or “conservative” — sometimes both at once. His most ambitious health care bill failed — perhaps one of his biggest legislative disappointments — because it didn’t go far enough to suit liberals. Republicans, especially after his 1980 defeat, cast him as a left-wing cartoon. It would be easiest to classify Carter as a centrist, Buttigieg said, “but there’s also something radical about the depth of his commitment to looking after those who are left out of society and out of the economy.” Indeed, Carter’s legacy is stitched with complexities, contradictions and evolutions — personal and political. The self-styled peacemaker was a war-trained Naval Academy graduate who promised Democratic challenger Ted Kennedy that he’d “kick his ass.” But he campaigned with a call to treat everyone with “respect and compassion and with love.” Carter vowed to restore America’s virtue after the shame of Vietnam and Watergate, and his technocratic, good-government approach didn't suit Republicans who tagged government itself as the problem. It also sometimes put Carter at odds with fellow Democrats. The result still was a notable legislative record, with wins on the environment, education, and mental health care. He dramatically expanded federally protected lands, began deregulating air travel, railroads and trucking, and he put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. As a fiscal hawk, Carter added a relative pittance to the national debt, unlike successors from both parties. Carter nonetheless struggled to make his achievements resonate with the electorate he charmed in 1976. Quoting Bob Dylan and grinning enthusiastically, he had promised voters he would “never tell a lie.” Once in Washington, though, he led like a joyless engineer, insisting his ideas would become reality and he'd be rewarded politically if only he could convince enough people with facts and logic. This served him well at Camp David, where he brokered peace between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Epypt’s Anwar Sadat, an experience that later sparked the idea of The Carter Center in Atlanta. Carter's tenacity helped the center grow to a global force that monitored elections across five continents, enabled his freelance diplomacy and sent public health experts across the developing world. The center’s wins were personal for Carter, who hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite, and nearly did. As president, though, the approach fell short when he urged consumers beleaguered by energy costs to turn down their thermostats. Or when he tried to be the nation’s cheerleader, beseeching Americans to overcome a collective “crisis of confidence.” Republican Ronald Reagan exploited Carter's lecturing tone with a belittling quip in their lone 1980 debate. “There you go again,” the former Hollywood actor said in response to a wonky answer from the sitting president. “The Great Communicator” outpaced Carter in all but six states. Carter later suggested he “tried to do too much, too soon” and mused that he was incompatible with Washington culture: media figures, lobbyists and Georgetown social elites who looked down on the Georgians and their inner circle as “country come to town.” Carter carefully navigated divides on race and class on his way to the Oval Office. Born Oct. 1, 1924 , Carter was raised in the mostly Black community of Archery, just outside Plains, by a progressive mother and white supremacist father. Their home had no running water or electricity but the future president still grew up with the relative advantages of a locally prominent, land-owning family in a system of Jim Crow segregation. He wrote of President Franklin Roosevelt’s towering presence and his family’s Democratic Party roots, but his father soured on FDR, and Jimmy Carter never campaigned or governed as a New Deal liberal. He offered himself as a small-town peanut farmer with an understated style, carrying his own luggage, bunking with supporters during his first presidential campaign and always using his nickname. And he began his political career in a whites-only Democratic Party. As private citizens, he and Rosalynn supported integration as early as the 1950s and believed it inevitable. Carter refused to join the White Citizens Council in Plains and spoke out in his Baptist church against denying Black people access to worship services. “This is not my house; this is not your house,” he said in a churchwide meeting, reminding fellow parishioners their sanctuary belonged to God. Yet as the appointed chairman of Sumter County schools he never pushed to desegregate, thinking it impractical after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision. And while presidential candidate Carter would hail the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson when Carter was a state senator, there is no record of Carter publicly supporting it at the time. Carter overcame a ballot-stuffing opponent to win his legislative seat, then lost the 1966 governor's race to an arch-segregationist. He won four years later by avoiding explicit mentions of race and campaigning to the right of his rival, who he mocked as “Cufflinks Carl” — the insult of an ascendant politician who never saw himself as part the establishment. Carter’s rural and small-town coalition in 1970 would match any victorious Republican electoral map in 2024. Once elected, though, Carter shocked his white conservative supporters — and landed on the cover of Time magazine — by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Before making the jump to Washington, Carter befriended the family of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whom he’d never sought out as he eyed the governor’s office. Carter lamented his foot-dragging on school integration as a “mistake.” But he also met, conspicuously, with Alabama's segregationist Gov. George Wallace to accept his primary rival's endorsement ahead of the 1976 Democratic convention. “He very shrewdly took advantage of his own Southerness,” said Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor and expert on Carter’s campaigns. A coalition of Black voters and white moderate Democrats ultimately made Carter the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South. Then, just as he did in Georgia, he used his power in office to appoint more non-whites than all his predecessors had, combined. He once acknowledged “the secret shame” of white Americans who didn’t fight segregation. But he also told Alter that doing more would have sacrificed his political viability – and thus everything he accomplished in office and after. King's daughter, Bernice King, described Carter as wisely “strategic” in winning higher offices to enact change. “He was a leader of conscience,” she said in an interview. Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19 at the age of 96, was identified by both husband and wife as the “more political” of the pair; she sat in on Cabinet meetings and urged him to postpone certain priorities, like pressing the Senate to relinquish control of the Panama Canal. “Let that go until the second term,” she would sometimes say. The president, recalled her former aide Kathy Cade, retorted that he was “going to do what’s right” even if “it might cut short the time I have.” Rosalynn held firm, Cade said: “She’d remind him you have to win to govern.” Carter also was the first president to appoint multiple women as Cabinet officers. Yet by his own telling, his career sprouted from chauvinism in the Carters' early marriage: He did not consult Rosalynn when deciding to move back to Plains in 1953 or before launching his state Senate bid a decade later. Many years later, he called it “inconceivable” that he didn’t confer with the woman he described as his “full partner,” at home, in government and at The Carter Center. “We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn Carter told AP in 2021. So deep was their trust that when Carter remained tethered to the White House in 1980 as 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, it was Rosalynn who campaigned on her husband’s behalf. “I just loved it,” she said, despite the bitterness of defeat. Fair or not, the label of a disastrous presidency had leading Democrats keep their distance, at least publicly, for many years, but Carter managed to remain relevant, writing books and weighing in on societal challenges. He lamented widening wealth gaps and the influence of money in politics. He voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later declared that America had devolved from fully functioning democracy to “oligarchy.” Yet looking ahead to 2020, with Sanders running again, Carter warned Democrats not to “move to a very liberal program,” lest they help re-elect President Donald Trump. Carter scolded the Republican for his serial lies and threats to democracy, and chided the U.S. establishment for misunderstanding Trump’s populist appeal. He delighted in yearly convocations with Emory University freshmen, often asking them to guess how much he’d raised in his two general election campaigns. “Zero,” he’d gesture with a smile, explaining the public financing system candidates now avoid so they can raise billions. Carter still remained quite practical in partnering with wealthy corporations and foundations to advance Carter Center programs. Carter recognized that economic woes and the Iran crisis doomed his presidency, but offered no apologies for appointing Paul Volcker as the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate hikes would not curb inflation until Reagan's presidency. He was proud of getting all the hostages home without starting a shooting war, even though Tehran would not free them until Reagan's Inauguration Day. “Carter didn’t look at it” as a failure, Alter emphasized. “He said, ‘They came home safely.’ And that’s what he wanted.” Well into their 90s, the Carters greeted visitors at Plains’ Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday School and where he will have his last funeral before being buried on family property alongside Rosalynn . Carter, who made the congregation’s collection plates in his woodworking shop, still garnered headlines there, calling for women’s rights within religious institutions, many of which, he said, “subjugate” women in church and society. Carter was not one to dwell on regrets. “I am at peace with the accomplishments, regret the unrealized goals and utilize my former political position to enhance everything we do,” he wrote around his 90th birthday. The politician who had supposedly hated Washington politics also enjoyed hosting Democratic presidential contenders as public pilgrimages to Plains became advantageous again. Carter sat with Buttigieg for the final time March 1, 2020, hours before the Indiana mayor ended his campaign and endorsed eventual winner Joe Biden. “He asked me how I thought the campaign was going,” Buttigieg said, recalling that Carter flashed his signature grin and nodded along as the young candidate, born a year after Carter left office, “put the best face” on the walloping he endured the day before in South Carolina. Never breaking his smile, the 95-year-old host fired back, “I think you ought to drop out.” “So matter of fact,” Buttigieg said with a laugh. “It was somehow encouraging.” Carter had lived enough, won plenty and lost enough to take the long view. “He talked a lot about coming from nowhere,” Buttigieg said, not just to attain the presidency but to leverage “all of the instruments you have in life” and “make the world more peaceful.” In his farewell address as president, Carter said as much to the country that had embraced and rejected him. “The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language,” he declared. “Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity and who suffer for the sake of justice — they are the patriots of this cause.” Carter pledged to remain engaged with and for them as he returned “home to the South where I was born and raised,” home to Plains, where that young lieutenant had indeed become “a fellow citizen of the world.” —- Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.French lawmakers vote to oust prime minister in the first successful no-confidence vote since 1962
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4 Compelling Singapore Stocks That Could Ride the AI Wave to Greater ProsperityJimmy Carter was respectively known as St Jimmy - universally revered for his good deeds in the poorest countries in the world and for the impeccable moral probity of his character, writes JONATHAN AITKENEOG Resources Inc. stock rises Wednesday, still underperforms market
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Shares of Trump Media & Technology ( DJT 3.60% ) missed out on the "Trump Trade" last month as the stock briefly popped after the election but then gave up those gains in what seemed to be a "buy the rumor/sell the news" event. Trump Media & Technology, which owns Truth Social, brings in almost no revenue, and the stock became something of an avatar for the Trump campaign before the election. Now that he's won, investors seem unsure about what to make of the stock. Additionally, the stock moved on reports that it was in talks to buy a cryptocurrency trading platform. Overall, the stock finished the month down 11%, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence . As you can see from the chart below, the stock swung up and down over the month, though it traded in negative territory for nearly the entirety of the month. ^SPX data by YCharts. Trump Media whiffs on the election Most investors in Trump Media stock probably expected the stock to go up after the election, and that did happen briefly. Shares of Trump Media initially surged on Nov. 6, the day after the election, and they cooled off to finish that session up 6%. However, they plunged the following day as it seemed there was no direct benefit to Trump's winning the White House, and they would remain below their closing price the day before the election for nearly the rest of the month. The other big piece of news out on the company was that it was in advanced talks to buy Bakkt , a publicly traded cryptocurrency trading platform that's majority owned by Intercontinental Exchange , according to the Financial Times . The news outlet said the deal would be an all-stock purchase. The valuation was unclear, but Bakkt's market cap is currently $155 million. That report dovetails with Trump's recent embrace of crypto, and Trump Media is also considering launching its own crypto payment service, according to The New York Times . What's next for Trump Media At this point, Trump Media seems to be a call option on the power of the Trump name and the company becoming something more than the business currently is, as Truth Social is not a significant revenue driver. Trump Media is launching a streaming service, but the crypto play is intriguing and a good way for the company to leverage the power of the Trump name and his followers. Until the business starts generating material revenue, investors should be skeptical of the stock, but there is potential for the company here if it can leverage the value of its stock into a real business.
The Ole Miss Rebels can secure a trip to the College Football Playoff and maybe even a trip to the SEC Championship Game if they win their final two games, one of which is tomorrow against Florida. Ahead of the game, one member of the Rebels is already taking shots at the Gators. Video of the Rebels traveling to Gainesville, Florida for tomorrow's game showed that Ole Miss pass rusher Princely Umanmielen was wearing a Florida ski mask. On3 Sports pointed out that Umanmielen transferred to Ole Miss after previously playing for Florida. Ole Miss EDGE Princely Umanmielen is traveling to Gainsville wearing a Florida ski mask💀 Umanmielen transferred from UF in the offseason. (h/t @OleMissNoProb ) https://t.co/G13hXXAREd pic.twitter.com/bXniMsYMjz In four seasons for the Gators, Umanmielen had 99 tackles, 26 tackles for loss and 15.0 sacks in 45 games. Through just nine games in his lone year for the Rebels, he's already achieved nearly half of that production with 12 tackles for loss and 7.5 sacks. It's been a downright great season for the Rebels and Umanmielen has done his part, which included two sacks, two tackles for loss and five tackles in their huge upset win over Georgia two weeks ago. That win over Georgia was arguably the biggest of head coach Lane Kiffin's career and has put the Rebels on the fast track to the College Football Playoff in spite of losses to Kentucky and LSU earlier this year. Icon Sportswire/Getty Images With their final games coming against 5-5 Florida and 2-8 Mississippi State, there's no reason that the Rebels shouldn't win out and finish the season 10-2 with a 6-2 in-conference record. From there, they just have to hope that the dominoes fall in a way that benefits them before the final College Football Playoff team selection is announced. Of course, Florida have shown that they can punch above their weight class a number of times under head coach Billy Napier and could just as easily rain on the Rebels' parade. The game will be played at 12 p.m. ET tomorrow and will air on ABC. Related: The 16 Most Painful College Football Programs To Root ForMore people finding permanent homes through city's homeless shelter program, city of Austin says
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Each week, Quartz rounds up product launches, updates, and funding news from artificial intelligence-focused startups and companies. Here’s what’s going on this week in the ever-evolving AI industry. ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode and writing update ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode and writing update OpenAI announced this week that it’s starting to roll out Advanced Voice Mode on the web browser version of ChatGPT. Paid users of ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu will be able to start a real-time conversation on the ChatGPT website. The AI startup also announced that it updated its GPT-4o model’s creative writing ability to have “more natural, engaging, and tailored writing.” The updated model can also work better with uploaded files, OpenAI said. The Allen Institute for AI’s Tülu 3 model family The Allen Institute for AI’s Tülu 3 model family The Allen Institute for AI announced its Tülu 3 family of open, fine-tuned models this week. The fine-tuning, or post-training, process refines models to perform specific tasks. Through Tülu 3, developers and researchers can find open-source data sets, model training recipes, code, and evaluation frameworks. The models range from 8 billion to 70 billion parameters , or the variables a model learns from training data that guide its ability to make predictions, according to Ai2. Enveda’s $130 million Series C for AI-assisted medicine Enveda’s $130 million Series C for AI-assisted medicine Enveda, a biotech company that uses AI to turn natural compounds into new medicines, announced an oversubscribed $130 million Series C funding round this week. The round was led by Kinnevik and FPV, and brings Enveda’s total funding to $360 million. The funding will help the company with advancing its pipeline of ten development drug candidates. Enveda is building an AI-powered platform called a “sequencer” “that combines metabolomics data with machine learning and high-throughput biological experiments to answer two fundamental questions of any natural sample at scale: (1) What are the molecules?, and (2) What do they do?,” the company said. “Some of the world’s greatest pharmaceutical breakthroughs have been derived from just 0.1% of nature’s chemistry,” Viswa Colluru, chief executive of Enveda, said in a statement. “We developed our platform to rapidly expand access to nature’s chemistry to find therapeutics at roughly four times the speed–and it’s already delivering results in the form of a deep and differentiated pipeline. This funding will help us advance multiple candidates to exciting clinical catalysts in the next year, confirming our guiding vision that life’s chemistry is an excellent source for new medicines.” Pickle Robot’s $50 million Series B for production robots Pickle Robot’s $50 million Series B for production robots Pickle Robot, which develops robotic automation systems for unloading trucks, announced a $50 million Series B funding round this week. The company, which calls itself a pioneer of physical AI, also announced that six customers have ordered over 30 production robots in the third quarter for deployment in early 2025. Pickle Robot’s physical AI technology combines a vision system with generative AI foundation models trained on millions of real logistics and warehouse operations data. “Pickle Robot customers are experiencing the value of Physical AI applied to a common logistics process that challenges thousands of operations every day,” AJ Meyer, chief executive and founder of Pickle Robot, said in a statement. “The new funding and our strategic customer relationships enable Pickle to chart the future of supply chain robotics, rapidly expand our core product capabilities, and grow our business to deliver tremendous customer value now and in the future.” Lightning AI’s $55 million equity investment Lightning AI’s $55 million equity investment Lightning AI, the company behind the PyTorch Lightning deep learning framework, announced a $50 million equity investment this week that included Nvidia ( NVDA ) and J.P. Morgan ( JPM ) . PyTorch Lightning has received over 160 million downloads since Lightning AI launched a year ago. Lightning AI combines dozens of separate AI development tools on one, multi-cloud platform where developers can build, train, and deploy AI models, and host AI apps securely. “Building your own AI platform today is like building your own Slack — it’s complex, costly, and not core to your business,” William Falcon, founder and chief executive of Lightning AI, said in a statement. “The value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge, and unique models — not in maintaining AI infrastructure. We have thousands of developers single-handedly training and deploying models at a scale that would have required teams of developers without Lightning.” Thoughtful AI’s agents for healthcare revenue cycle management Thoughtful AI’s agents for healthcare revenue cycle management Thoughtful AI launched its specialized AI agents for revenue cycle management in healthcare this week. The AI-powered revenue cycle transformation company’s new agents include CODY for coding and notes review, and CAM for claims processing. “Our team of AI Agents turn RCM from a bottleneck into a powerhouse, using AI and automation to tackle tedious, time-consuming tasks so that healthcare teams can optimize revenue and focus on what matters most – patients,” Alex Zekoff, co-founder and chief executive of Thoughtful AI, said in a statement. Reforged Labs’ video ad creation platform for gaming Reforged Labs’ video ad creation platform for gaming Reforged Labs, an AI-powered video creation service for mobile game studios, launched its AI-powered video ad service this week that it says can deliver tailored, cost-effective ads in less than 24 hours. The startup’s proprietary AI engine was trained with thousands of game ads, Reforged Labs said. “We want to help level the playing field for game studios with limited resources,” Robert Huynh, chief executive and co-founder of Reforged Labs, said in a statement. “With our full-service creative solution that’s tailored for game marketing, studios can benefit from proven ad templates and AI-driven production and editing, all without lengthy briefs or big budgets.”Political interest vs. interest rates