Former female sports greats, media figures, and even a conservative lawmaker tore into a recent New York Times article for referring to women as “non-transgender women.” Tennis legend Martina Navratilova and other prominent people blasted the piece online for the characterization, stating the outlet should just be referring to biological women as women. “NYT- you stink. We are women, NOT TRANSGENDER WOMEN. Just WOMEN will do in the future,” Navratilova wrote on the social media platform on Friday. The Times published an article Thursday which documented the inner turmoil of a women’s college volleyball team – the San Jose State University Spartans – attempting to field a transgender female player in upcoming tournament games. The attempt to get the trans player to compete has caused division, not only in the league, but among team members, some of whom are suing their own team. The outlet reported, “Earlier this month, a senior co-captain of the Spartans and the assistant coach filed a lawsuit to stop the transgender athlete from playing in this week’s Mountain West Conference tournament, claiming that she violates Title IX rights to gender equity at federally funded institutions.” The co-captain was joined by 10 female volleyball players, most of whom are on other teams that play against the Spartans. The Times described the situation as a “complicated mess,” noting that “some of the Spartans no longer talk to one another at practice or outside of games” and adding that even the head coach – who supports the trans student – “has stopped talking to some players off the court, too.” The Times reporter Juliet Macur appeared to step into the debate as well, as further down in her piece, she employed the term “non-transgender women” as one way to distinguish biological women. Describing some of the science that fuels that debate as to whether trans women can compete in women’s sport, Macur wrote, “On its website, the N.C.A.A. says trans volleyball players are eligible to play if their testosterone level is less than 10 nanomoles per liter — that’s at least four times more than what many experts say is the top of the range for non-transgender women, and in the typical range for adult men.” At other points in the piece, the reporter also referred to the biological female athletes as “athletes assigned female at birth.” Frustrated social media users trashed these controversial descriptions of women. British Olympian and activist Sharron Davies posted, “Written in the NYT ... women are now Non-transgender women! Just wow! How anyone can say this isn’t a men’s rights movement I’ll never know, whilst women lose their rights, their words, their safeguards, their sports, their sex discrimination laws... I will never understand.” Anti-trans activism account “WomenAreReal” addressed the outlet on X, stating, “Hey @nytimes Don’t call us ‘non-transgender women.’ Just stop it. Stop all the offensive terms for us.” The account listed other politically correct terms trans activists have used to referred to biological women, including, “birthing parent,” “uterus haver,” “menstruator,” and “vaginal presenting.” “We are WOMEN!” the account added. Journalist Tiffany Wong posted, “LMAO, New York Times is calling normal, sane women ‘non-transgender women.’” Conservative journalist Andy Ngo remarked, “In woke ideology, there are only transgender women and non-transgender women.” Even Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., trashed the outlet, stating, “The New York Times, everybody, where women are defined as ‘non-transgender women.’ What bs. #HoldTheLine.” Fox News Digital reached out to The New York Times for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
Mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) are now available in New Mexico, where residents can load them into either their Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. New Mexico is the ninth state with an mDL in production supported by both Apple and Google Wallet. The mDL can be verified for in-person transactions by initiating a connection by scanning a QR Code, after which encrypted data is transmitted through Bluetooth, according to the New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division (NMMVD). License-holders in the state can enroll their ID by scanning it within the app, enrolling their face biometrics, and then sending both to the NMMVD for approval. Technology suppliers for have not been disclosed. Like digitized versions of U.S. passports, these digital IDs can be used at “select TSA checkpoints across the country,” but do not replace the physical passport for use at immigration and border checks. Two among those select locations are Albuquerque Sunport and at the Lea County Regional Airport, where mDL acceptance will go live within weeks. The privacy standards underpinning mDLs continue to evolve, meanwhile, with the ISO SC 17/WG 10 discussing how to layer zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) onto the mDoc mDL format. VP of Global Standards Andrew Hughes says in a that a conversation at the group’s meeting last week in Sapporo included “a proposal to create ‘circuits’ designed to act as deviceResponse objects instead of the current attributes+MSO,” with the device public key unshared to prevent unwanted correlation. Hughes will join a Ryan Galuzzo from NIST for a discussing the integration and interoperability of mDLS and digital wallets based on ISO 18013 on December 19. Illinois is supposed to begin issuing mDLs on January 1, 2025, but no update on the state program has been given since August, when Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias expressed not just support but excitement for it, reports. Giannoulias’ office did not respond to questions from the publication about what progress has been made towards the mDLs launch. That’s when Governor J.B. Pritzker to establish the program, following amendments to clarify privacy and liability rules. H.B. 4592 directs the Secretary of State to issue the digital IDs by the New Year’s Day deadline, so either an announcement is imminent, or the deadline will be missed. Ajay Gupta expects remote transactions, whether identity verification or confirmation of an attribute like age, will be the use case which grows the most in the immediate future. He was speaking in the latest episode of Trinsic’s “ ” podcast. Asked by Trinsic CEO Riley Hughes why more states have not already pushed out mDLs, Gupta says: “The motivation of doing it is a no-brainer, the effort of doing it is probably it.” That motivation is not just about giving state residents the best technology to make access to public and private services convenient. It is also about reducing costs for the DMV, since interactions with residents through the online channel are less costly than its legacy channels, like snail mail. The same change can similarly drive down costs for other government departments, while also reducing the cost of fraud within the system, which is inevitably pushed down to consumers. California’s rollout is a pilot so far, but Gupta says the only limitation so far is on the number of users. Furthermore, the program issued the most mDLs in the nation, Gupta says, despite having not yet reached its limit of 1.5 million. California’s mDL is provided with liveness detection provided by and age verification capabilities from in a DMV wallet made by , but also become in September. | | | | | | | | | |WASHINGTON, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Jimmy Carter, the earnest Georgia peanut farmer who as U.S. president struggled with a bad economy and the Iran hostage crisis but brokered peace between Israel and Egypt and later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work, died at his home in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday, the Carter Center said. He was 100. “My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son. “My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.” A Democrat, he served as president from January 1977 to January 1981 after defeating incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford in the 1976 U.S. election. Carter was swept from office four years later in an electoral landslide as voters embraced Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, the former actor and California governor. Carter lived longer after his term in office than any other U.S. president. Along the way, he earned a reputation as a better former president than he was a president - a status he readily acknowledged. His one-term presidency was marked by the highs of the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, bringing some stability to the Middle East. But it was dogged by an economy in recession, persistent unpopularity and the embarrassment of the Iran hostage crisis that consumed his final 444 days in office. In recent years, Carter had experienced several health issues including melanoma that spread to his liver and brain. Carter decided to receive hospice care in February 2023 instead of undergoing additional medical intervention. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96. He looked frail when he attended her memorial service and funeral in a wheelchair. Carter left office profoundly unpopular but worked energetically for decades on humanitarian causes. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 in recognition of his "untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." Carter had been a centrist as governor of Georgia with populist tendencies when he moved into the White House as the 39th U.S. president. He was a Washington outsider at a time when America was still reeling from the Watergate scandal that led Republican Richard Nixon to resign as president in 1974 and elevated Ford from vice president. "I'm Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president. I will never lie to you," Carter promised with an ear-to-ear smile. Asked to assess his presidency, Carter said in a 1991 documentary: "The biggest failure we had was a political failure. I never was able to convince the American people that I was a forceful and strong leader." Despite his difficulties in office, Carter had few rivals for accomplishments as a former president. He gained global acclaim as a tireless human rights advocate, a voice for the disenfranchised and a leader in the fight against hunger and poverty, winning the respect that eluded him in the White House. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his efforts to promote human rights and resolve conflicts around the world, from Ethiopia and Eritrea to Bosnia and Haiti. His Carter Center in Atlanta sent international election-monitoring delegations to polls around the world. A Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher since his teens, Carter brought a strong sense of morality to the presidency, speaking openly about his religious faith. He also sought to take some pomp out of an increasingly imperial presidency - walking, rather than riding in a limousine, in his 1977 inauguration parade. The Middle East was the focus of Carter's foreign policy. The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, based on the 1978 Camp David accords, ended a state of war between the two neighbors. Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland for talks. Later, as the accords seemed to be unraveling, Carter saved the day by flying to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal shuttle diplomacy. The treaty provided for Israeli withdrawal from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and establishment of diplomatic relations. Begin and Sadat each won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. By the 1980 election, the overriding issues were double-digit inflation, interest rates that exceeded 20% and soaring gas prices, as well as the Iran hostage crisis that brought humiliation to America. These issues marred Carter's presidency and undermined his chances of winning a second term. On Nov. 4, 1979, revolutionaries devoted to Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, seized the Americans present and demanded the return of the ousted shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was backed by the United States and was being treated in a U.S. hospital. The American public initially rallied behind Carter. But his support faded in April 1980 when a commando raid failed to rescue the hostages, with eight U.S. soldiers killed in an aircraft accident in the Iranian desert. Carter's final ignominy was that Iran held the 52 hostages until minutes after Reagan took his oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981, to replace Carter, then released the planes carrying them to freedom. In another crisis, Carter protested the former Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. He also asked the U.S. Senate to defer consideration of a major nuclear arms accord with Moscow. Unswayed, the Soviets remained in Afghanistan for a decade. Carter won narrow Senate approval in 1978 of a treaty to transfer the Panama Canal to the control of Panama despite critics who argued the waterway was vital to American security. He also completed negotiations on full U.S. ties with China. Carter created two new U.S. Cabinet departments - education and energy. Amid high gas prices, he said America's "energy crisis" was "the moral equivalent of war" and urged the country to embrace conservation. "Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth," he told Americans in 1977. In 1979, Carter delivered what became known as his "malaise" speech to the nation, although he never used that word. "After listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America," he said in his televised address. "The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America." As president, the strait-laced Carter was embarrassed by the behavior of his hard-drinking younger brother, Billy Carter, who had boasted: "I got a red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer." Jimmy Carter withstood a challenge from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination but was politically diminished heading into his general election battle against a vigorous Republican adversary. Reagan, the conservative who projected an image of strength, kept Carter off balance during their debates before the November 1980 election. Reagan dismissively told Carter, "There you go again," when the Republican challenger felt the president had misrepresented Reagan's views during one debate. Carter lost the 1980 election to Reagan, who won 44 of the 50 states and amassed an Electoral College landslide. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, one of four children of a farmer and shopkeeper. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, served in the nuclear submarine program and left to manage the family peanut farming business. He married his wife, Rosalynn, in 1946, a union he called "the most important thing in my life." They had three sons and a daughter. Carter became a millionaire, a Georgia state legislator and Georgia's governor from 1971 to 1975. He mounted an underdog bid for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, and out-hustled his rivals for the right to face Ford in the general election. With Walter Mondale as his vice presidential running mate, Carter was given a boost by a major Ford gaffe during one of their debates. Ford said that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration," despite decades of just such domination. Carter edged Ford in the election, even though Ford actually won more states - 27 to Carter's 23. Not all of Carter's post-presidential work was appreciated. Former President George W. Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, both Republicans, were said to have been displeased by Carter's freelance diplomacy in Iraq and elsewhere. In 2004, Carter called the Iraq war launched in 2003 by the younger Bush one of the most "gross and damaging mistakes our nation ever made." He called George W. Bush's administration "the worst in history" and said Vice President Dick Cheney was "a disaster for our country." In 2019, Carter questioned Republican Donald Trump's legitimacy as president, saying "he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf." Trump responded by calling Carter "a terrible president." Carter also made trips to communist North Korea. A 1994 visit defused a nuclear crisis, as President Kim Il Sung agreed to freeze his nuclear program in exchange for resumed dialogue with the United States. That led to a deal in which North Korea, in return for aid, promised not to restart its nuclear reactor or reprocess the plant's spent fuel. But Carter irked Democratic President Bill Clinton's administration by announcing the deal with North Korea's leader without first checking with Washington. In 2010, Carter won the release of an American sentenced to eight years hard labor for illegally entering North Korea. Carter wrote more than two dozen books, ranging from a presidential memoir to a children's book and poetry, as well as works about religious faith and diplomacy. His book "Faith: A Journey for All," was published in 2018. Sign up here. Reporting and writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott and Diane Craft Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab Thomson Reuters Jasper Ward is a breaking news reporter in Washington. She primarily covers national affairs and U.S. politics. Jasper was previously based in The Bahamas where she covered the collapse of FTX and the subsequent arrest of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried. She was a part of the Reuters team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for breaking news for its FTX coverage.
The suspect in the high-profile killing of a health insurance CEO that has gripped the United States graduated from an Ivy League university, reportedly hails from a wealthy family, and wrote social media posts brimming with cerebral musings. Luigi Mangione, 26, was thrust into the spotlight Monday after police revealed he is their person of interest in the brutal murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a father of two, last week in broad daylight in Manhattan in a case that laid bare deep frustration and anger with America's privatized medical system. News of his capture in Pennsylvania -- following a tip from a McDonald's worker --triggered an explosion of online activity, with Mangione quickly amassing new followers on social media as citizen sleuths and US media tried to understand who he is. While some lauded him as a hero and lamented his arrest, others analyzed his intellectual takes in search of ideological clues. A photo on one of his social media accounts includes an X-ray of an apparently injured spine. No explicit political affiliation has emerged. Meanwhile, memes and jokes proliferated, many riffing on his first name and comparing him to the "Mario Bros." character Luigi, sometimes depicted in AI-altered images wielding a gun or holding a Big Mac. "Godspeed. Please know that we all hear you," wrote one user on Facebook. "I want to donate to your defense fund," added another. According to Mangione's LinkedIn profile, he is employed as a data engineer at TrueCar, a California-based online auto marketplace. A company spokesperson told AFP Mangione "has not been an employee of our company since 2023." Although he had been living in Hawaii ahead of the killing, he originally hails from Towson, Maryland, near Baltimore. He comes from a prominent and wealthy Italian-American family, according to the Baltimore Banner. The family owns local businesses, including the Hayfields Country Club, its website says. A standout student, Mangione graduated at the top of his high school class in 2016. In an interview with his local paper at the time, he praised his teachers for fostering a passion for learning beyond grades and encouraging intellectual curiosity. A former student who knew Mangione at the Gilman School told AFP the suspect struck him as "a normal guy, nice kid." Sign up to get our free daily email of the biggest stories! "There was nothing about him that was off, at least from my perception," this person said, asking that their name not be used. "Seemed to just be smiling, and kind of seemed like he was a smart kid. Ended up being valedictorian, which confirmed that," the former student said. Mangione went on to attend the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, where he completed both a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science by 2020, according to a university spokesperson. While at Penn, Mangione co-led a group of 60 undergraduates who collaborated on video game projects, as noted in a now-deleted university webpage, archived on the Wayback Machine. On Instagram, where his following has skyrocketed from hundreds to tens of thousands, Mangione shared snapshots of his travels in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. He also posted shirtless photos flaunting a six-pack and appeared in celebratory posts with fellow members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. However, it is on X (formerly Twitter) that users have scoured Mangione's posts for potential motives. His header photo -- an X-ray of a spine with bolts -- remains cryptic, with no public explanation. Finding a coherent political ideology has also proved elusive, though he had written a review of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto on the online site goodreads, calling it "prescient." Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, carried out a string of bombings in the United States from 1978 to 1995, a campaign he said was aimed at halting the advance of modern society and technology. Mangione called Kaczynski "rightfully imprisoned," while also saying "'violence never solved anything' is a statement uttered by cowards and predators." According to CNN, handwritten documents recovered when Mangione was arrested included the phrase "these parasites had it coming." Mangione has also linked approvingly to posts criticizing secularism as a harmful consequence of Christianity's decline. In April, he wrote, "Horror vacui (nature abhors a vacuum)." The following month, he posted an essay he wrote in high school titled "How Christianity Prospered by Appealing to the Lower Classes of Ancient Rome." In another post from April, he speculated that Japan's low birthrate stems from societal disconnection, adding that "fleshlights" and other vaginal-replica sex toys should be banned. ia/nro/dwJim Harbaugh and Chargers focused on accomplishing more after wrapping up playoff berthFormer President Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer who vowed to restore morality and truth to politics after an era of White House scandal and who redefined post-presidential service, died Sunday at the age of 100. The Carter Center said the 39th president died in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family. The White House has been notified that Carter has died, per a Biden administration official. Preparations for the state funeral have begun, according to a law enforcement official. Carter had been in home hospice care since February 2023 after a series of short hospital stays. Carter, a Democrat, served a single term from 1977 to 1981, losing a reelection bid to Ronald Reagan. Despite his notable achievements as a peacemaker, Carter’s presidency is largely remembered as an unfulfilled four years shaken by blows to America’s economy and standing overseas. His most enduring legacy, though, might be as a globetrotting elder statesman and human rights pioneer during an indefatigable 43-year “retirement.” Carter became the oldest living former president when he surpassed the record held by the late George H.W. Bush in March 2019. Carter’s beloved wife, Rosalynn, died in November 2023. They had been inseparable during their 77-year marriage, and after she passed away, the former president said in a statement that “as long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.” The former president attended his wife’s memorial events, including a private burial and a televised tribute service in Atlanta, where he was seated in the front row in a reclined wheelchair. He did not deliver any remarks. Carter took office in 1977 with the earnest promise to lead a government as “good and honest and decent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people” following what had started as an unlikely long-shot bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination. The Southerner with a flashing smile did enjoy significant successes, particularly abroad. He forged a rare, enduring Middle East peace deal between Israel and Egypt that stands to this day, formalized President Richard Nixon’s opening to communist China and put human rights at the center of US foreign policy. But Carter was ultimately felled by a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, in which revolutionary students flouted the US superpower by holding dozens of Americans in Tehran. The feeling of US malaise triggered by the crisis was exacerbated by Carter’s domestic struggles, including a sluggish economy, inflation and an energy crisis. At times, Carter’s principled moral tone and determination to strip the presidency of ostentation, such as by selling the official yacht, Sequoia, seemed to verge on sanctimony. But out of office, Carter won admiration by living his values. Just a day after one of several falls he suffered in 2019, he was back out building homes for Habitat for Humanity, even with an ugly black eye and 14 stitches — and teaching Sunday school as he had done several hundreds of times . The devout Southern Baptist’s life’s work was only just beginning when he limped out of the White House, humiliated by Reagan’s 1980 Republican landslide, in which the incumbent won only six states and the District of Columbia. “As one of the youngest of former presidents, I expected to have many useful years ahead of me,” Carter wrote in his 1982 memoir, “Keeping Faith.” He proved as good as his word, going on to become a humanitarian icon, perhaps more popular outside the United States than he was at home. Over four decades, Carter, Rosalynn and his Atlanta-based organization monitored hot-spot elections, negotiated with despots, battled poverty and homelessness, fought disease and epidemics, and promoted public health in the developing world. In the process, Carter did nothing less than reinvent the concept of the post-presidency, blazing a philanthropic path since adopted by successors such as Bill Clinton and, in Africa, George W. Bush. His efforts on behalf of his Carter Center, founded to “wage peace, fight disease and build hope,” yielded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Even into old age, Carter remained a polarizing political figure. He was an uneasy member of the ex-presidents’ club, sometimes frustrating successors like Clinton and criticizing the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and of US allies such as Israel. In recent years, he came full circle as he warned of the corrosive impact on American politics of a scandal-plagued White House — just as he did when his critique of the Nixon era helped him beat the disgraced Republican ex-president’s unelected successor, Gerald Ford, in 1976. (After Carter left office, he and Ford became close friends.) In September 2019, Carter warned Americans against reelecting President Donald Trump . “I think it will be a disaster to have four more years of Trump,” he said. After losing reelection, his work at the Carter Center became a great consolation. The ex-president said in a moving news conference detailing a cancer diagnosis in August 2015 that being president had been the highlight of his political career, even if it ended prematurely — though he would not swap another four years in the White House for the joy he had taken after leaving office in working with the Carter Center. And he said he was at peace with his legacy after a rich, fulfilling life: “I think I have been as blessed as any human being in the world.” Carter also said at that August news conference that marrying Rosalynn was the “pinnacle” of his life. He is survived by four children — Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy — 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren, according to the Carter Center. In April 2021, President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the Carters at their home in Plains, after the former presidential couple was unable to travel to Washington for the 46th president’s inauguration. An unlikely president Carter had always seemed an unlikely president. No one gave the Georgia governor and former Navy submariner a hope when he launched his campaign for the White House. But Carter spent months crisscrossing the cornfields and small towns of Iowa, building support voter by voter. In many ways, his success created the political lore of the modern Iowa caucuses as a place where little-known outsiders — Obama, for instance — could build a grassroots campaign that could lead to the White House. Democrats have recently downgraded the Hawkeye State’s role in their nominating process, reasoning that its mostly White demographic doesn’t represent the diversity of their supporters or the nation. Timing is crucial for presidential hopefuls, and as it turned out, Carter proved to be the right man at the right time in 1976. The deep political wounds of the Watergate scandal, which had forced the resignation of Nixon, remained raw. The nation was still deeply cynical about politicians following the social dislocation of the Vietnam War. “I’ll never lie to you,” Carter promised voters, forging a public image as an honest, humble, God-fearing, racially inclusive son of the “New South.” “He was never embarrassed to have a Georgian accent or be in blue jeans and play horseshoes and softball,” said his biographer Douglas Brinkley. That down-to-earth persona of Carter proved alluring. He followed up victory in the Iowa caucuses with wins in New Hampshire and Florida, beating out Democratic candidates including George Wallace of Alabama, Morris Udall of Arizona and Jerry Brown of California. “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president,” Carter said, poking fun at his leap from obscurity as he accepted his party’s nomination at the 1976 Democratic convention in New York City, where he tapped Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. Carter’s openness was crucial to his appeal with voters — but occasionally, his truth-telling appeared off-key. On one such occasion, Carter admitted to Playboy that he had looked on women with lust and “committed adultery in my heart many times.” A focus on human rights Carter beat Ford by 297 to 240 electoral votes and vowed in his inaugural address to put universal rights at the center of US foreign policy. “Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights. We do not seek to intimidate, but it is clear that a world which others can dominate with impunity would be inhospitable to decency and a threat to the well-being of all people,” he said. Carter’s most significant achievement as president was the Camp David Accords, reached after exhaustive negotiations between Egypt and Israel that peaked at the presidential retreat in Maryland. It was the first peace deal between the Jewish state and one of its Arab enemies. The agreement, signed by Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978, called for a formal peace between the foes and the establishment of diplomatic relations. It resulted in the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and called for an Israeli exit from the West Bank and Gaza, with promised future negotiations to resolve the Palestinian question. While it did not settle the question of East Jerusalem, and subsequent violence and political unrest between Israel and the Palestinians meant the deal’s full potential was never realized, the enduring peace between Israel and Egypt remains a linchpin of US diplomacy in the region. In subsequent decades, Carter soured on the Israeli leadership, becoming deeply critical of what he saw as a failure to live up to obligations toward the Palestinians. He sparked controversy in 2006 by saying that Israel’s settlement policies on the West Bank were tantamount to the apartheid policies of South Africa. The Carter administration also forged progress outside the Middle East, in Latin America and Asia. He countered growing hostility to the United States throughout the Western Hemisphere by concluding the Panama Canal treaties in 1977, which would return the strategic waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the control of its host nation in 1999. There had been fears that the Panamanians, increasingly resentful of US sovereignty, could trigger a showdown by closing the canal — a step that would have had significant economic and strategic consequences. Carter also built on Nixon’s achievement of opening China by formalizing an agreement to establish full diplomatic relations in January 1979. An iconic visit to the United States by a cowboy-hat-wearing Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping followed. The decision was a tough one for Carter and required him to sever formal diplomatic relations with the renegade government and US ally in Taiwan — which had claimed to be the legitimate government of China — in favor of the communists in Beijing. That June, Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the treaty concluding the second round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), which placed broad limits on strategic nuclear arms. Some analysts also give Carter credit for beginning the buildup of sophisticated weaponry that later helped Reagan outpace the Soviet Union and win the Cold War — a heavy political lift as the Pentagon remained unpopular in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Crises at home and abroad At home, meanwhile, Carter established the Department of Energy and exhorted Americans to cut down on consumption amid an oil price spike. He installed solar panels on the White House roof. He also began the process of deregulating the airline and trucking industries. But in 1979, Carter did himself significant political damage in an extraordinary address to the nation on the energy crisis in which he listed criticisms of his presidency, painting a picture of a listless nation trapped in a moral and spiritual funk. “It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation,” Carter said. Ultimately, the speech came back to haunt Carter and made it easy for opponents, not least Reagan, to portray him as a pessimistic and uninspiring leader. Still, in the late 1970s, it seemed conceivable that Carter’s command of foreign policy at the height of the Cold War would give him a fair shot at a second term. But a swelling of revolutionary Islam — heralding a trend that would confound future presidents — conspired to sweep him out of the White House. In October 1979, the United States let the shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi — who had been overthrown by the Iranian Revolution a few months earlier — enter the country for medical treatment. That infuriated Islamic revolutionaries who saw him as an oppressive US puppet and wanted him returned to Iran for trial. On November 4, a year before the US election, students who supported the Islamic revolution seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage. The 444-day standoff transfixed the nation, souring the national mood day by day as television news bulletins tallied how long the hostages had been in custody. Gradually it dashed Carter’s hopes of a second term. His fortunes were also battered by a daring and ultimately disastrous rescue bid in which a US helicopter carrying special forces crashed in the desert, killing eight US servicemen. At the same time, the Cold War was approaching a pivotal point. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter decided to boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow and asked the Senate to delay ratification of SALT II. As November 1980 approached, a sense of Soviet belligerence and the lengthening humiliation of the hostage crisis fostered an impression of US power under siege. “It was a perfect storm of unpleasant events, and that inability of Carter to get those Iranian hostages released before the 1980 elections spelled doomsday,” Brinkley said. Carter wrote in his memoirs that his destiny was out of his hands as the election approached, but he prayed the hostages would be released. “Now, my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control,” he said. “If the hostages were released, I was convinced my election would be assured; if the expectations of the American people were dashed again, there was little chance I could win.” Throughout the campaign, Reagan berated Carter as an ineffectual leader consigning America to perpetual decline. “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his,” Reagan charged. The actor-turned-California governor pulled off a stunning landslide on Election Day 1980, winning 489 electoral votes. In the final humiliation for Carter, on January 20, 1981, 20 minutes after Reagan was sworn in, Iran released the hostages. Humble beginnings Carter was born on October 1, 1924, to James Earl Carter Sr. and Lillian Gordy Carter, who lived in a house without electricity in the south Georgia village of Plains. The oldest of four children, he was the first future US president to be born in a hospital. Growing up during the Great Depression in the segregated Deep South, Carter showed a flair for music, art and literature, and often played with African American children — a factor influencing his thoughts on integration that played out in his political career. After studying reactor technology and nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Carter was assigned to the submarine force. The future peacemaker served in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets before he was tapped by Adm. Hyman Rickover, the crotchety “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” to serve as a senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second US nuclear submarine. After leaving active Navy duty in 1953, Carter spent time raising his children, running the family peanut farm and taking his first political steps, winning election to the Georgia Senate in 1962. He lost the Democratic nomination to run for governor to segregationist Lester Maddox in 1966 but ran successfully for the same office four years later. Political energy undimmed Carter was 56 when he left the White House, and he soon looked for new outlets for his undimmed political energy. “In the presidency, he got a sense of the fact that the world can be changed, and it doesn’t take a government to change it; it can be changed one person at a time, one disease at a time, building one house at a time,” said Andrew Young, who was a US ambassador to the United Nations under Carter. The former president and first lady visited more than 130 countries to meet with foreign leaders and other prominent individuals. Carter was still traveling after his 90th birthday. As recently as May 2015, Carter went to Guyana to monitor the country’s most important election in two decades. The Carter Center has observed more than 125 elections in 40 nations since its founding in 1982. “We try to fill vacuums in the world,” Carter told an audience at the center in 2010, “by doing things that others don’t want to do or cannot do because of diplomatic niceties. That’s part of bringing peace.” Sometimes that meant mixing with unsavory company. In 1994, the United States and North Korea were edging toward conflict over US concerns that Pyongyang was building a nuclear weapon. Absent diplomatic relations between the two countries, President Clinton gave Carter and Rosalynn permission to travel to the isolated Stalinist state to meet its supreme leader, Kim Il-Sung. In exchange for dialogue with the United States, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program, which defused the crisis — for a few years at least. The same year, Carter was credited with helping avert a US invasion of Haiti and restoring President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. In 2002, he became the first former or sitting US president since 1928 to visit Cuba, where he called on the United States to end its “ineffective” economic embargo and challenged President Fidel Castro to hold free elections, grant more civil liberties and improve human rights. In 2008, he met with leaders from the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, designated a terrorist group by the US State Department, and from Syria. At times, Carter also criticized the United States in public. In a June 2012 op-ed in The New York Times, Carter accused the United States of “abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.” He cited revelations that officials were targeting people — including US citizens — for assassination abroad as “disturbing proof” that the nation’s stance on human rights had changed for the worse. An enduring partnership In the summer of 1945, Carter, then a fresh-faced US Naval Academy student, met Eleanor Rosalynn Smith and, after their first date, told his mother, “She’s the girl I want to marry.” Rosalynn rejected his first proposal but accepted the second a few weeks later. They wed in 1946 and would eventually become the longest-married presidential couple in history. Carter was asked the secret of his enduring marriage on CNN’s “The Lead” in July 2015. “Rosalynn has been the foundation for my entire enjoyment of life. ... First of all, it’s best to choose the right woman, which I did. And secondly, we give each other space to do our own things,” Carter told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We try to be reconciled before we go to sleep at night and try to find everything we can think of that we like to do together. So we have a lot of good times.” When he published his book “A Full Life” shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, Carter contemplated his own mortality. He wrote that he was at peace with his accomplishments as president as well as his unrealized goals. He said he and Rosalynn were “blessed with good health and look to the future with eagerness and confidence, but are prepared for inevitable adversity when it comes.” This story has been updated with additional information. Tom Watkins and CNN’s Jeff Zeleny and Haley Talbot contributed to this report.
A new theory has emerged, raising questions about whether ride-hailing apps charge iPhone users more than Android users for the same rides. Recent tests conducted by The Times of India (TOI) have sparked speculation, with findings showing consistently higher prices for iOS users in Chennai. The tests compared cab fares for identical routes checked simultaneously on iPhone and Android devices. Although the price differences were most noticeable for shorter, single rides, the results are not definitive proof of discrimination. Factors like varying demand and fluctuating algorithms make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Nonetheless, the findings have reignited concerns about the opaque pricing strategies used by ride-hailing platforms. In response, Uber has denied any practice of personalizing fares based on the type of phone a user owns. They attributed the discrepancies to dynamic pricing, which is influenced by factors such as real-time demand, estimated travel time, and distance. However, Ola, another popular ride-hailing service, did not respond to TOI’s inquiries. Experts, however, have raised doubts about these explanations. C. Ambigapathy, managing director of Chennai-based ride-hailing platform Fastrack, suggested that it is technically possible for companies to adjust fares based on the user’s hardware. He believes ride-hailing companies could easily manipulate fares while citing dynamic pricing algorithms as a cover. P. Ravikumar, a former senior director at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, explained that advanced machine learning technologies such as Google Cloud AI and Azure ML enable ride-hailing platforms to incorporate a range of variables—including device type and usage patterns—into their pricing models. He suggested that if consistent factors like estimated travel time and distance were accounted for, users should not face discrepancies based on their device. One expert involved in framing India’s aggregator policy noted that surge pricing is not only tied to the type of device a user owns. Instead, platforms adjust fares based on a user’s behavior and patterns, with frequent users or those who check fares multiple times often facing higher prices. Despite these claims, the allegations have yet to be independently verified. However, experts are calling for greater transparency from ride-hailing platforms to ensure fair pricing practices for all users, regardless of the device they use. Also Read: Indigo Launches Holiday Packages, Direct Flight From Kolkata To PhuketSeadrill Announces Sale of Jack-Up West Prospero