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Former US president dies aged 100
On the evening of Sunday, December 29, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter , who was also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, passed away at the age of 100. His son confirmed the news of his death without specifying the cause. In February 2023, following multiple hospitalizations, the Carter Center announced that the former president had decided to forego further medical treatment and return home to receive only palliative care. In his last public appearance two months ago, Carter celebrated his 100th birthday in the garden of his Georgia home, surrounded by family and friends. Last November, his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, passed away. Carter had expressed his desire to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris as President of the United States, telling his son Chip, “I’m trying to hold on so I can vote for Harris.” Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, served from January 20, 1977, to January 20, 1981. He secured his party’s nomination on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention and won the election on November 2, 1976. Key foreign policy achievements during his administration included the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Carter championed human rights worldwide. Domestically, his administration enacted a comprehensive energy program through the newly created Department of Energy, deregulated various industries, and passed significant environmental legislation, including the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which doubled the size of the national park system and tripled wilderness areas. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, and grew up in nearby Archery. His father was a farmer and businessman, and his mother was a nurse. Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, served in the Navy as a submariner, and pursued graduate studies in reactor technology and nuclear physics. After his father’s death in 1953, he returned to Georgia to manage the family farm and engage in community leadership. In 1982, Carter became a Distinguished Professor at Emory University and co-founded the Carter Center with his wife Rosalynn. The non-partisan, non-profit center addresses global public policy issues, including conflict resolution, human rights, and disease prevention. Under Carter’s leadership, the center played a pivotal role in Guinea worm disease eradication efforts and conducted election monitoring in over 100 countries. Carter authored 32 books on topics ranging from politics and history to poetry and personal reflections. He and Rosalynn volunteered annually with Habitat for Humanity and remained active in their Baptist church in Plains. Carter received the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his decades-long efforts to find peaceful solutions to conflicts, promote democracy, and advance social and economic development. Explore related questions
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ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Michigan gave athletic director Warde Manuel a five-year contract extension Thursday on the heels of the Wolverines' upset over rival Ohio State and a strong start to the basketball season. Manuel, who has held the position since 2016, signed through June 30, 2030, the school announced. Manuel is also chairman of the College Football Playoff selection committee. “During Warde’s tenure as director, Athletics has put a structure in place where our student-athletes compete for Big Ten and national championships, excel in the classroom, and proudly graduate with their University of Michigan degrees,” university President Santa J. Ono said in the announcement. Michigan had a disappointing football season, finishing 7-5 (5-4 Big Ten), but a 13-10 win over then-No. 2 Ohio State took some pressure off of the program. The Buckeyes were favored by 21 points, the widest point spread for the rivalry since 1978, according to ESPN Stats and Info. The Wolverines won the national championship last year in their final season led by coach Jim Harbaugh, whose tenure at the school involved multiple NCAA investigations for recruiting and sign-stealing allegations. Manuel supported Harbaugh through those processes. In basketball, the women's team made its season debut (No. 23) in the AP Top 25 this week. The men are 7-1 a season after firing coach Juwan Howard, who lost a school-record 24 games in 2023-24 as Michigan plummeted to a last-place finish in the Big Ten for the first time since 1967. Michigan has won 52 Big Ten championships since 2020. “Every day, I am thankful to work at this great institution and to represent Michigan Athletics," Manuel said in a statement. "I especially want to thank the student-athletes, coaches and staff who compete for each of our teams and who have helped us achieve unparalleled success athletically and academically. I am excited to continue giving back to a university that has provided me with so much over my career.” Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-footballOlivia Olson scored 18 points, including eight straight to open the fourth quarter, as the No. 23 Michigan Wolverines survived a 60-54 scare from the Northwestern Wildcats in the Big Ten opener for each team in Ann Arbor, Mich. Northwestern (4-4, 0-1 Big Ten) led throughout the third quarter and took a four-point lead into the fourth, but Olson capped her 8-0 burst with a 3-pointer, and Syla Swords also nailed a trey to put the Wolverines (8-1, 1-0) ahead 50-44. Michigan has won eight straight games since opening the season with a six-point loss to then-No. 1 South Carolina. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.
Jimmy Carter was the epitome of a servant leader, said Rocky Face resident George Sutherland. "It was never about him," said Sutherland. "It was about what was best for the community, for the state, for the nation." Carter, a former president and governor of Georgia, passed away in Plains on Sunday about 3:45 p.m. at age 100. Carter had been in hospice care since February 2023. Sutherland grew up in Plains and knew Carter since Sutherland was a boy. Carter returned to Plains in 1953, leaving the U.S. Navy to take over the family peanut farm and warehouse after the death of his father. "He was a very personable individual," Sutherland said. "My dad was a peanut farmer like the Carters. He'd do business with the Carter warehouse. I remember being there. He was very hands on. I remember siting on a sawhorse while he was building something and talking to him. I was probably 10 or 11 years old. He was very easy to talk to." Sutherland recalls that Carter quickly became a leader in the community. In 1957, Carter served as the president of the Plains Lions Club, and under his leadership, the club built and began to operate a community swimming pool. "That's one of the first things I remember him doing," Sutherland said. "He also organized a group of businessmen to recruit a doctor when the only doctor in Plains retired." Dalton attorney Terry Miller first got to know Carter while working as an intern in the governor's office during Carter's tenure. He would later have some interaction with Carter while working for U.S. Rep. Ed Jenkins during Carter's term as president. "I attended Emory University in Atlanta from 1968 to 1972, and some of my college days overlapped with his service in the governor's mansion (1971 to 1975)," Miller said. "While I was in school, I believe it was his administration that initiated the governor's intern program. The summer after my third year of college, I applied for and was accepted by that program with a number of other college students from around the state. I was assigned that summer and the next summer, because I did it for two summers, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles." Miller described the internship as a tremendous learning experience. "The governor's key people would hold seminars for us about state government," he said. "It was an interesting time." He said he didn't have a great deal of interaction with Carter, but the time he did spend with him left a big impression on him. "I, and I believe that most if not all of the other students in the intern program, felt that both Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were interested in us," he said. "I think that was the reason he organized that opportunity for students. The two of them would organize a reception at least once a month for the students at the governor's mansion. They were gracious hosts, very kind." "The people who worked for him in the governor's office, many of whom went with him to Washington, were very loyal to him," Miller said. "And he was definitely a man of faith." Miller said there was a sense of urgency in the governor's office. "The thing I remember is that governors were limited to one term in those days," he said. "The window of opportunity to get things done was really the first two years. A lot of times, their ability to get things done in their final year, maybe final two years, was limited because people in the legislature knew they weren't going to be there much longer." Miller said Jenkins told him "there probably wasn't a finer person in public service." "That was one of the impressions I had, too" Miller said. "Of course, I didn't have a lot of interaction with him personally, but I did interact with members of his administration, both in Atlanta and Washington, and I enjoyed being around them. Something that Mr. Jenkins and I talked about often was that whether you agreed with Carter on an issue or disagreed, you felt that he had an honorable intention behind his position." Miller said Carter was a student of the Middle East, probably because of his strong faith. "He had an enormous heart for peace in the Middle East. I think that's why he was able to get (Egyptian president Anwar) Sadat and (Israeli prime minister Menachem) Begin together to reach that accord." "I believe that his reputation will only increase as we look back through the years," Miller said. Dalton State College professor Ken Ellinger was 17 when Carter first ran for president in 1976. "It was the first political campaign I was personally involved in," he said. "My dad sponsored the Young Democrats at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. I went door-to-door with the Young Democrats campaigning for Carter. All of those young college kids were extremely fired-up about Jimmy Carter." Ellinger said Carter's sincerity appealed to that generation. "It seems hokey today because there is so much cynicism today," he said. "But he was such a breath of fresh air coming out of Watergate, so forthright, so earnest. He answered hard questions, and he gave thoughtful answers." Seventeen candidates sought the Democratic presidential nomination that year, and several started the race with greater name recognition than the one-term governor of Georgia. "When he started out he was such a dark horse," Ellinger said. "People were saying 'Jimmy who?'" Ellinger said he takes issue with those who say Carter had a failed presidency, pointing to accomplishments such as the Middle East peace deal between Egypt and Israel and the treaties that gave Panama control of the Panama Canal. "I think he was committed to doing the right thing even if it wasn't the popular thing," he said. Ellinger pointed to the unconditional pardon Carter granted to those who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. "I'm sure he knew that would hurt him politically but it was the right thing to do," he said. After leaving office in 1981, Carter remained active in world affairs through the Carter Center in Atlanta, but he continued to call Plains home. "I think it's neat that he came back to Plains and never gave up his house," Ellinger said. In 2003, Ellinger and his family traveled to Plains and took part in a Sunday School class Carter conducted at Maranatha Baptist Church. "He was an excellent Sunday School teacher," he recalled. "My daughter, who was 16 at the time, said it was the best Sunday School lesson she'd ever heard. He related the Bible to things going on in the world." Dalton attorney Warren Coppedge and his wife Patti were among the volunteers on Carter's 1971 run for governor. "As was typical of the day, a candidate would visit the Oakwood Cafe at meal time, walk in the front door and shake hands with customers," Warren Coppedge recalled in a written account. "Jimmy Carter visited the Oakwood, but he entered through the kitchen and shook hands with the employees first." Coppedge was later part of the Peanut Brigade, a group of volunteers, mostly from Georgia, who campaigned across the country for Carter during his 1976 presidential run.
Advising readers to scan the night sky this time of year always feels a little awkward, because the Pacific Northwest’s view-obscuring cloud cover is legendary in winter. (Not to mention fall and spring.) You never do know if all the bright, shiny stuff up there will be wrapped in a wet, dark blanket. If we do get lucky with clear night skies this month, looking up will be worth it. You may have already noticed one standout shiny star that’s been rising after sunset and crossing the night sky in recent months. This weekend, that shiny star will reach maximum visibility and brilliance, from our point of view. Jupiter is our solar system’s planetary supergiant. With a diameter of 88,000 miles, Jupiter is 11 times larger than Earth. Its volume is over 1,300 times the Earth’s — that is, more than 1,300 Earths could fit inside of Jupiter. Jupiter’s gravity is so immense, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke theorized in his novel “2010: Odyssey Two” that Jupiter’s super-compressed heart could be the largest gem in the universe. “There, by one of Nature’s supreme jests, was something very precious to mankind,” Clarke writes. “The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth.” In coming days, supergiant Jupiter will achieve two orbital milestones: opposition and perigee. Opposition simply means that an outer planet is directly opposite the sun, with Earth in between. It’s as if the sun and Jupiter sit at two ends of a cosmically long string, with Earth perched somewhere along that straight line. When the sun sets, Jupiter rises (in the east-northeast, just before 4:30 p.m. Saturday). When the sun rises the next morning, Jupiter sets. A planet in opposition is also in “full phase,” reflecting sunlight back at us with maximum fullness and brightness — especially at midnight, when the bright planet climbs to its highest point in the contrasting darkness. Opposition only applies to the outer planets — the ones farther away from the sun than Earth. Inner planets Mercury and Venus are closer to the sun than we are, so they never appear on the other side of the sky. Meanwhile, Jupiter is also drawing closer to Earth than its irregular, oval-shaped orbit has brought it since 2022. That point of planetary closeness is called perigee. On Dec. 6, the distance between Jupiter and Earth will shrink to an intimate 380 million miles, according to the website earthsky.org . Put all these phenomena together — Jupiter’s hugeness, its full-phase brilliance and its passing proximity to Earth — and you’ve got the perfect conditions for a planet that really pops in our night sky. Jupiter can get so surprisingly brilliant on and around its opposition and perigee, the occasional unsuspecting sky spectator has been known to wonder — and worry — what that humongous, motionless, gleaming thing might be. In October 2010, according to The Peninsula Daily News, the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office fielded numerous reports of a UFO that turned out to be shimmering Jupiter. While oppositions can be pretty spectacular, they’re not rare. They occur about once a year as Earth’s speedy orbit sends us whizzing past all the slower-moving outer planets. (It takes Jupiter 11.9 years to orbit the sun.) As we do that, those planets sometimes appear to start looping backward in the sky, in an illusion called retrograde motion. Viewing Jupiter Jupiter was a prime target of inventor and astronomer Galileo’s innovation, the telescope, in 1610. As he started tracking the movements of four little white dots around the planet, Galileo realized he was witnessing a cosmic proof of the law of gravitation, with satellite worlds circling a massive one. You can make the same discovery for yourself. Get out your binoculars and train it upon the planetary giant. It’ll be hard to miss four points of light hugging the planet and moving around it, night after night. Those are the Jovian satellites Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. All but the latter are larger than Earth’s moon. Galileo was the first to discover another planet’s moons. In the years since, astronomers with better technology than hand-made telescopes have spotted many more moons around Jupiter. The count is now up to 95 moons, according to NASA. With sufficiently powerful binoculars, you’ll also be able to make out the churning cloud bands that encircle the planet. If not, Jupiter’s sharp brilliance is still guaranteed to impress. Jupiter will remain visible in our night sky through April 2025. What else is up? Red planet Mars will grow distinctly bright in December as it gets ready for its own oppositional star turn Jan. 16. Mars rises in the east-northeast at about 8 p.m. Saturday, but by the end of the month it’ll be appearing hours earlier. While it’s tough to see any detail without a powerful telescope, Mars’ ruddy shine makes it unmistakable in the sky. Finally, don’t get too excited about the peak of the annual Geminids meteor shower, expected Dec. 13. That’s because a waxing moon will also be preparing to peak (on Dec. 15), likely washing out all but the brightest shooting stars. Moonlight will last throughout that night, dampening whatever show the Geminids put on for us. If you’re determined to catch some Geminids, the time to start looking is now, since this meteor shower is active late November through Christmas.
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Shopping on Temu can feel like playing an arcade game. Instead of using a joystick-controlled claw to grab a toy, visitors to the online marketplace maneuver their computer mouses or cellphone screens to browse colorful gadgets, accessories and trinkets with prices that look too good to refuse. A pop-up spinning wheel offers the chance to win a coupon. Rotating captions warn that a less than $2 camouflage print balaclava and a $1.23 skeleton hand back scratcher are “Almost sold out.” A flame symbol indicates a $9.69 plush cat print hoodie is selling fast. A timed-down selection of discounted items adds to the sense of urgency. Pages from the Shein website, left, and from the Temu site, right. Welcome to the new online world of impulse buying, a place of guilty pleasures where the selection is vast, every day is Cyber Monday, and an instant dopamine hit is always just a click away. By all accounts, we’re living in an accelerating age for consumerism, one that Temu, which is owned by the Chinese e-commerce company PDD Holdings, and Shein, its fierce rival , supercharged with social media savvy and an interminable assortment of cheap goods, most shipped directly from merchants in China based on real-time demand. The business models of the two platforms, coupled with avalanches of digital or influencer advertising, have enabled them to give Western retailers a run for their money this holiday shopping season. A Christmas tree ornament purchased on Temu. Software company Salesforce said it expects roughly one in five online purchases in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada to be made through four online marketplaces based or founded in Asia: Shein, Temu, TikTok Shop — the e-commerce arm of video-sharing platform TikTok — and AliExpress. Analysts with Salesforce said they are expected to pull in roughly $160 billion in global sales outside of China. Most of the sales will go to Temu and Shein, a privately held company which is thought to lead the worldwide fast fashion market in revenue. Lisa Xiaoli Neville, a nonprofit manager who lives in Los Angeles, is sold on Shein. The bedroom of her home is stocked with jeans, shoes, press-on nails and other items from the ultra-fast fashion retailer, all of which she amassed after getting on the platform to buy a $2 pair of earrings she saw in a Facebook ad. Neville, 46, estimates she spends at least $75 a month on products from Shein. A $2 eggshell opener, a portable apple peeler and an apple corer, both costing less than $5, are among the quirky, single-use kitchen tools taking up drawer space. She acknowledges she doesn’t need them because she “doesn’t even cook like that.” Plus, she’s allergic to apples. “I won’t eat apples. It will kill me,” Neville said, laughing. “But I still want the coring thing.” Shein, now based in Singapore, uses some of the same web design features as Temu’s, such as pop-up coupons and ads, to persuade shoppers to keep clicking, but it appears a bit more restrained in its approach. Shein primarily targets young women through partnerships with social media influencers. Searching the company's name on video platforms turns up creators promoting Shein's Black Friday sales event and displaying the dozens of of trendy clothes and accessories they got for comparatively little money. But the Shein-focused content also includes videos of TikTokers saying they're embarrassed to admit they shopped there and critics lashing out at fans for not taking into account the environmental harms or potential labor abuses associated with products that are churned out and shipped worldwide at a speedy pace. Neville has already picked out holiday gifts for family and friends from the site. Most of the products in her online cart cost under $10, including graphic T-shirts she intends to buy for her son and jeans and loafers for her daughter. All told, she plans to spend about $200 on gifts, significantly less than $500 she used to shell out at other stores in prior years. “The visuals just make you want to spend more money,” she said, referring to the clothes on Shein's site. “They're very cheap and everything is just so cute.” Unlike Shein, Temu's appeal cuts across age groups and gender. The platform is the world’s second most-visited online shopping site, software company Similarweb reported in September. Customers go there looking for practical items like doormats and silly products like a whiskey flask shaped like a vintage cellphone from the 1990s. Temu advertised Black Friday bargains for some items at upwards of 70% off the recommended retail price. Making a purchase can quickly result in receiving dozens of emails offering free giveaways. The caveat: customers have to buy more products. Despite their rise, Temu and Shein have proven particularly ripe for pushback. Last year, a coalition of unnamed brands and organizations launched a campaign to oppose Shein in Washington. U.S. lawmakers also have raised the possibility that Temu is allowing goods made with forced labor to enter the country. More recently, the Biden administration put forward rules that would crack down on a trade rule known as the de minimis exception, which has allowed a lot of cheap products to come into the U.S. duty-free. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to slap high tariffs on goods from China, a move that would likely raise prices across the retail world. Both Shein and Temu have set up warehouses in the U.S. to speed up delivery times and help them better compete with Amazon, which is trying to erode their price advantage through a new storefront that also ships products directly from China. 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