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Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. The 39th president of the United States was a Georgia peanut farmer who sought to restore trust in government when he assumed the presidency in 1977 and then built a reputation for tireless work as a humanitarian. He earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He died Sunday, more than a year after entering hospice care, at his home in Plains, Georgia. At age 52, Carter was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 1977, after defeating President Gerald R. Ford in the 1976 general election. Carter left office on Jan. 20, 1981, following his 1980 general election loss to Ronald Reagan. Here's the latest: The longest-lived American president died Sunday, more than a year after entering hospice care , at his home in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023 , spent most of their lives. “Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” The Carter Center said in posting about his death on the social media platform X. It added in a statement that he died peacefully, surrounded by his family. In his 1975 book “Why Not The Best,” Carter said of himself: “I am a Southerner and an American, I am a farmer, an engineer, a father and husband, a Christian, a politician and former governor, a planner, a businessman, a nuclear physicist, a naval officer, a canoeist, and among other things a lover of Bob Dylan’s songs and Dylan Thomas’s poetry.” A moderate Democrat, Carter entered the 1976 presidential race as a little-known Georgia governor with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist mores and technocratic plans reflecting his education as an engineer. After he left office and returned home to his tiny hometown of Plains in southwest Georgia, Carter regularly taught Sunday School lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church until his mobility declined. Those sessions drew visitors from around the world.
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Beirut, Nov 25 (AP) Israel's military launched airstrikes across Lebanon on Monday, unleashing explosions throughout the country and killing at least 12 while Israeli leaders appeared to be closing in on a negotiated ceasefire with the Hezbollah militant group. Israeli strikes hit commercial and residential buildings in Beirut as well as in the port city of Tyre. Military officials said they targeted areas known as Hezbollah strongholds. They issued evacuation orders for Beirut's southern suburbs, and strikes landed across the city, including metres from a Lebanese police base and the city's largest public park. The barrage came as officials indicated they were nearing agreement on a ceasefire, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Security Cabinet prepared to discuss an offer on the table. Airstrikes kill at least 12 Massive explosions lit up Lebanon's skies with flashes of orange, sending towering plumes of smoke into the air as Israeli airstrikes pounded Beirut's southern suburbs Monday. The blasts damaged buildings and left shattered glass and debris scattered across nearby streets. No casualties were reported after many residents fled the targeted sites. Some of the strikes landed close to central Beirut and near Christian neighbourhoods and other targets where Israel had issued evacuation warnings, including in Tyre and Nabatieh province. Israeli airstrikes also hit the northeast Baalbek-Hermel region without warning. Lebanon's Health Ministry said Monday that at least 12 people were killed in the strikes in the Tyre province, adding to the more than 3,700 people in Lebanon who have been killed since Israel launched its invasion two months ago. Many of those killed since the start of the war between Israel and Hezbollah have been civilians, and health officials said some of the recovered bodies were so severely damaged that DNA testing would be required to confirm their identities. Israel says it has killed more than 2,000 Hezbollah members. Lebanon's Health Ministry says the war has displaced 1.2 million people. The latest round of airstrikes came weeks after Israeli ground forces invaded southern Lebanon in early October, meeting heavy resistance in a narrow strip of land along the border. The military had previously exchanged attacks across the border with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group that began firing rockets into Israel the day after the war in Gaza began last year. Lebanese politicians have decried the ongoing airstrikes and said they are impeding US-led ceasefire negotiations. The country's deputy parliament speaker accused Israel of ramping up its bombardment in order to pressure Lebanon to make concessions in indirect ceasefire negotiations with Hezbollah. Elias Bousaab, an ally of the militant group, said on Monday that the pressure has increased because “we are close to the hour that is decisive regarding reaching a ceasefire”. Hopes grow for a ceasefire Israeli officials voiced similar optimism Monday about prospects for a ceasefire. Mike Herzog, the country's ambassador to Washington, earlier in the day told Israeli Army Radio that several points had yet to be finalized. Though any deal would require agreement from the government, Herzog said Israel and Hezbollah were “close to a deal". “It can happen within days,” he said. Israeli officials have said the sides are close to an agreement that would include withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon and a pullback of Hezbollah fighters from the Israeli border. But several sticking points remain. Two Israeli officials told The Associated Press that Netanyahu's security Cabinet had scheduled a meeting for Tuesday, but they said it remained unclear whether the Cabinet would vote to approve the deal. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal deliberations. Danny Danon, Israel's UN ambassador, told reporters Monday that he expected a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah to have stages and to be discussed by leaders Monday or Tuesday. Still, he warned, “it's not going to happen overnight”. After previous hopes for a ceasefire were dashed, US officials cautioned that negotiations were not yet complete and noted that there could be last-minute hitches that either delay or destroy an agreement. "Nothing is done until everything is done," White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Monday. The proposal under discussion to end the fighting calls for an initial two-month ceasefire during which Israeli forces would withdraw from Lebanon and Hezbollah would end its armed presence along the southern border south of the Litani River. The withdrawals would be accompanied by an influx of thousands more Lebanese army troops, who have been largely sidelined in the war, to patrol the border area along with an existing UN peacekeeping force. Western diplomats and Israeli officials said Israel is demanding the right to strike in Lebanon if it believes Hezbollah is violating the terms. The Lebanese government has said that such an arrangement would authorise violations of the country's sovereignty. A ceasefire could mark a step toward ending the regionwide war that ballooned after Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. The lack of a ceasefire has emerged as a political liability for Israeli leaders including Netanyahu, particularly while 60,000 Israelis remain away from their homes in the country's north after more than a year of cross-border violence. Hezbollah rockets have reached as far south into Israel as Tel Aviv. At least 75 people have been killed, more than half of them civilians. More than 50 Israeli soldiers died fighting in the ground offensive in Lebanon. The Israeli military said about 250 projectiles were fired Sunday, with some intercepted. A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, the strongest of Iran's armed proxies, is expected to significantly calm regional tensions that have led to fears of a direct, all-out war between Israel and Iran. It's not clear how the ceasefire will affect the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Hezbollah had long insisted that it would not agree to a ceasefire until the war in Gaza ends, but it dropped that condition. While the proposal is expected to be approved if Netanyahu brings it to a vote in his security Cabinet, one hard-line member, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, said he would oppose it. He said on X that a deal with Lebanon would be a “big mistake” and a “missed historic opportunity to eradicate Hezbollah”. If the ceasefire talks fail, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said, “it will mean more destruction and more and more animosity and more dehumanization and more hatred and more bitterness”. Speaking at a G7 meeting in Fiuggi, Italy, the last summit of its kind before US President Joe Biden leaves office, Safadi said such a failure "will doom the future of the region to more conflict and more killing and more destruction”. (AP) PY PY (This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)The two-minute timeout. The transfer portal as de facto free agency. Collectives generating name, image and likeness (NIL) money for athletes becoming like a payroll. The impending arrival of revenue sharing. It didn't take long for Belichick to envision how a college program should look based on his own NFL experience. "I do think there are a lot of parallels," Belichick said. And that's at least partly why the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach is now taking over at North Carolina. Years of rapid change at the have only increased the professionalization of college football across the country, with schools adjusting staffing to handle growing duties once seemingly more fitting for a pro team. UNC just happens to be making the most audacious of those bets, bringing in a 72-year-old who has never coached in college and asking him to build what amounts to a mini-NFL front office. But plenty could follow. "I really think there's going to be some of those guys that maybe don't have a job in the NFL anymore," Kansas State general manager Clint Brown said, "and now that this is going to be structured in a way where there is a cap that that's going to be something they're interested in." The rapid changes in college athletics have fueled that, notably with players able to transfer and play right away without sitting out a year and be paid through NIL endorsement opportunities in the past five years. Recruiting is now just as much about bringing in veteran talent through the portal as signing recruits out of high school, mirroring the NFL with free agency and the draft, respectively. And a bigger change looms with revenue sharing, the result of a $2.78 billion legal settlement to antitrust lawsuits. Specifically, that model will allow the biggest schools to establish a pool of about $21.5 million for athletes in the first year, with a final hearing in that case set for April 2025. It will be up to schools to determine how to distribute that money and in which sports, though football's role as the revenue driver in college sports likely means a prominent cut everywhere as a direct parallel to a professional team's salary cap. Throw all that together, and it's why coaches are adjusting their staffs like Florida's Billy Napier interviewing candidates to be the Gators' general manager. "We're built to do it now," Napier said. "The big thing here is that we're getting ready to be in a business model. We have a cap. We have contracts. We have negotiation. We have strategy about how we distribute those funds, and it's a major math puzzle. "We're going to build out a front office here in the next couple of months, and it's primarily to help us manage that huge math problem," Napier added. "There'll be a ton of strategy around that. I'm looking forward to it." Still, that also explains why Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule, the former head coach of the NFL's Carolina Panthers, said: "This job as a head coach is a juggernaut. There's way more to do here than I had to do in the NFL." And it explains why the Tar Heels are betting on Belichick to be the right fit for today's changing climate. "If I was 16 of 17 years old, a coach who came at you and won how many Super Bowls? And he said, 'Come play for me,'" said New York Giants offensive lineman Joshua Ezeudu, now in his third year out of UNC. "I mean, that's pretty hard to turn down now, especially in this day and age, he's telling you to come play for him and he's offering you some money, too. I mean, you can't go wrong with that choice." The timing worked for UNC with Belichick, who was bypassed for some NFL openings after leaving the New England Patriots last year and instead spent months taking a closer look at the college game. Those conversations with coaches — some in the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten and Southeastern conferences, he said Thursday — made him understand how the changes in college aligned with his pro experience. "College kind of came to me this year," Belichick said. "I didn't necessarily go and seek it out." And his mere presence in Chapel Hill makes a difference, with athletic director Bubba Cunningham saying his "visibility" would likely allow the team to raise prices for advertising such as sponsorships and signage. Belichick is also hiring Michael Lombardi, a former NFL general manager and executive, as the Tar Heels' general manager. Cunningham also said the plan is for Belichick to continue his appearances on former NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning's "Manningcast" broadcasts during Monday Night Football as well as ESPN's "The Pat McAfee Show" — all giving the coach the chance to promote himself and the program. Yet these steps to reshape football at North Carolina comes with a rising price. Belichick will make $10 million per year in base and supplemental pay, with the first three years of the five-year deal guaranteed, according to a term sheet released by UNC on Thursday. That's roughly double of former coach Mack Brown, whose contract outlined about $4.2 million in base and supplemental salary before bonuses and other add-ons. Additionally, Belichick's deal includes $10 million for a salary pool for assistant coaches and $5.3 million for support staff. That's up from roughly $8.1 million for assistants and $4.8 million for support staff for the 2022 season, according to football financial data for UNC obtained by The Associated Press. And those figures from 2022 under Brown were already up significantly from Larry Fedora's tenure with the 2017 season ($4 million for assistant coaches, $2.3 million for support staff). There is at least one area where the Tar Heels are set for Belichick's arrival: facilities. UNC spent more than $40 million on its football practice complex with an indoor facility (2018) as the biggest project, while other projects include $3 million in upgrades to the locker room and weight room (2019), $14.5 million on renovations to the Kenan Football Center (2022), even $225,000 on Brown's former office (2021). Now it's up to Belichick to rethink the approach to football here for the changing times. "We're taking a risk," Cunningham said. "We're investing more in football with the hope and ambition that the return is going to significantly outweigh the investment." AP Sports Writers Tom Canavan in New Jersey; Mark Long in Florida; and Eric Olson in Nebraska; contributed to this report.UL's Kamryn Jones (34) is coming off a 14-point, 12-rebound performance for the Cajuns heading into Tuesday's 6 p.m. home game against New Orleans. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save The regular season may have started for UL women’s basketball team on Nov. 4 in DeKalb, Illinois, but the truth is coach Garry Brodhead’s club has only played one game over the last 17 days. So when the Ragin’ Cajuns take on New Orleans at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Cajundome, it’ll almost be like starting over. “It’s good to start playing again,” Brodhead said. “I think we’re going to have a tough stretch, but we’re excited about it.” On one hand, the inactivity was good for the Cajuns because of a handful of key injuries. On the other hand, it’s hard to make much actual progress when practicing not at full strength. Brodhead is hoping Friday’s 60-55 home win over Nicholls to get to 2-1 was just the beginning. “My concern was that we had four or five kids that hadn’t played yet this year and we were able to bring them back (vs. Nicholls),” he said. “I was pleased how we played. We didn’t shoot the ball extremely well, but we did some really good things.” One of those returning players was Jaylyn James, who was a second-team preseason all-Sun Belt performer. James had a team-high 16 points – including a pair of 3-pointers – with four rebounds. Also, Houston transfer Kamryn Jones returned with 14 points, 12 rebounds, two assists and three steals. “The Jones kid is going to be really good for us, because of the style she plays,” Brodhead said. “She’s just a tough kid and I think she’s going to be able to not only score, but do some of the things you’re not really going to notice about her. She’s just so aggressive on the boards.” New Orleans comes into the game 0-5, but that includes losses to Alabama, TCU, South Alabama and most recently 78-70 at Texas Tech. “They’re a lot bigger,” Brodhead said. “They played Texas Tech down to the wire. They made a run at the end. They run that motion offense that’s a little harder to guard. “It took us almost 20 minutes to run one play (Sunday) to guard it and try to figure it out, because of how we were guarding it. Eventually, we got it.” Nubia Benedith was UL’s third double-figure scorer in the win with 13 points and four rebounds. “I was kind of pleased that we were able to play some of them more minutes than we though in the Nicholls game,” Brodhead said. “I would have rathered to play a few more games, but the circumstances didn’t work out.”
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