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lucky 7 lucky numbers Leave it to OMSI to offer a chemistry lesson at the ice rink. The new indoor synthetic ice rink at Portland’s science museum is made of high-density polyethylene plastic, created by Swiss company Glice . A sign next to the new rink shows the chemical structure of polymers like those in “Glice,” specifically engineered to replicate the smoothness of ice and produce a low coefficient of friction. “OMSI on Ice” is the museum’s first time hosting an indoor synthetic ice rink, and it’s the first holiday event the museum has hosted since it discontinued its “ Gingerbread Adventures ” program during the pandemic. “With this route, we’re going for something a little bit different, a little bit more active, and still having that community vibe,” said April Abate, OMSI’s director of membership and guest services. And OMSI has purchased the rink, so expect it to become a regular feature each winter. At 20 feet by 40 feet, this skating rink is tiny compared with the 50-by-100 temporary outdoor ice rink at the west end of the Morrison Bridge. The rink can be found inside OMSI’s auditorium, which has been turned into a cozy holiday oasis illuminated by Christmas lights. For children too young to skate, tables have been set up with board games and coloring activities. Lubricants are sprayed over the rink surface to allow for better gliding. During a preview day Friday, OMSI staff were still perfecting that lubricant-to-Glice ratio. While a staff member skated with ease during a demonstration, this reporter found it difficult, with not quite the same glide as real ice. If you’re looking for a true indoor ice skating experience, you’ll have better luck at Lloyd Center . But if you’re looking for a way to tire out the kids on a cold and rainy day, OMSI’s ice rink should do the trick. The skating rink is open during most of OMSI’s regular operating hours through Jan. 1. Tickets for 30-minute time slots can be reserved online, and up to 15 tickets can be purchased for each session. Tickets are $9 for adults, $8 for seniors, $7 for children ages 5 to 13, and half price for OMSI members. (And if you’re thinking of buying an OMSI membership, those are 20% off starting Nov. 23 .) Rink admission includes free skate rentals. Ice skating supports are also available. Learn more or buy tickets online at omsi.edu/exhibits/ice-rink . Looking for other places to ice skate? Check out our roundup of Portland-area ice rinks . — Samantha Swindler covers features for The Oregonian/OregonLive and Here is Oregon . Reach her at sswindler@oregonian.com .High Stakes in Jharkhand: Assembly Election Results AwaitedUnlike scores of people who scrambled for the blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy to lose weight in recent years, Danielle Griffin had no trouble getting them. The 38-year-old information technology worker from New Mexico had a prescription. Her pharmacy had the drugs in stock. And her health insurance covered all but $25 to $50 of the monthly cost. For Griffin, the hardest part of using the new drugs wasn’t access. It was finding out that the much-hyped medications didn’t really work for her. “I have been on Wegovy for a year and a half and have only lost 13 pounds,” said Griffin, who watches her diet, drinks plenty of water and exercises regularly. “I’ve done everything right with no success. It’s discouraging.” In clinical trials, most participants taking Wegovy or Mounjaro to treat obesity lost an average of 15% to 22% of their body weight — up to 50 pounds or more in many cases. But roughly 10% to 15% of patients in those trials were “nonresponders” who lost less than 5% of their body weight. Now that millions of people have used the drugs, several obesity experts told The Associated Press that perhaps 20% of patients — as many as 1 in 5 — may not respond well to the medications. It's a little-known consequence of the obesity drug boom, according to doctors who caution eager patients not to expect one-size-fits-all results. “It's all about explaining that different people have different responses,” said Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity expert at Massachusetts General Hospital The drugs are known as GLP-1 receptor agonists because they mimic a hormone in the body known as glucagon-like peptide 1. Genetics, hormones and variability in how the brain regulates energy can all influence weight — and a person's response to the drugs, Stanford said. Medical conditions such as sleep apnea can prevent weight loss, as can certain common medications, such as antidepressants, steroids and contraceptives. “This is a disease that stems from the brain,” said Stanford. “The dysfunction may not be the same” from patient to patient. Despite such cautions, patients are often upset when they start getting the weekly injections but the numbers on the scale barely budge. “It can be devastating,” said Dr. Katherine Saunders, an obesity expert at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-founder of the obesity treatment company FlyteHealth. “With such high expectations, there’s so much room for disappointment.” That was the case for Griffin, who has battled obesity since childhood and hoped to shed 70 pounds using Wegovy. The drug helped reduce her appetite and lowered her risk of diabetes, but she saw little change in weight. “It’s an emotional roller coaster,” she said. “You want it to work like it does for everybody else.” The medications are typically prescribed along with eating behavior and lifestyle changes. It’s usually clear within weeks whether someone will respond to the drugs, said Dr. Jody Dushay, an endocrine specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Weight loss typically begins right away and continues as the dosage increases. For some patients, that just doesn't happen. For others, side effects such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea force them to halt the medications, Dushay said. In such situations, patients who were counting on the new drugs to pare pounds may think they’re out of options. “I tell them: It's not game over,” Dushay said. Trying a different version of the new class of drugs may help. Griffin, who didn't respond well to Wegovy, has started using Zepbound, which targets an additional hormone pathway in the body. After three months of using the drug, she has lost 7 pounds. “I'm hoping it's slow and steady,” she said. Other people respond well to older drugs, the experts said. Changing diet, exercise, sleep and stress habits can also have profound effects. Figuring out what works typically requires a doctor trained to treat obesity, Saunders noted. “Obesity is such a complex disease that really needs to be treated very comprehensively,” she said. “If what we’re prescribing doesn’t work, we always have a backup plan.” The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Even with access to blockbuster obesity drugs, some people don't lose weight

“Hunter was singled out only because he is my son,” Joe Biden said on Sunday, when he issued a pardon that saved Hunter Biden from serving time for his gun and tax crimes. That much was accurate, but not in the way the president meant. Naked nepotism allowed Hunter Biden to avoid the consequences of a criminal justice system that punishes people for conduct that violates no one’s rights and compounds that punishment when they demand the trial to which they are entitled under the Sixth Amendment. While the pardon was undeniably hypocritical, those injustices are real, and they affect many people who lack the political connections to escape them. Last June, a federal jury convicted Hunter Biden of three felonies based on his 2018 purchase of a revolver, which was illegal because he was a crack cocaine user. The case sits at the intersection of two policies that punish people for actions that are not inherently criminal. As the philosopher Douglas Husak has observed, drug and gun possession laws forbid “inchoate offenses,” which involve conduct that is not necessarily harmful. They “do not proscribe harm itself,” Husak notes, “but rather the possibility of harm — a possibility that need not (and typically does not) materialize when the offense is committed.” Since Hunter Biden’s possession of a revolver harmed no one, his father argues, a prison sentence was not justified for that offense. Although the president is right about that, his position is blatantly inconsistent with his support for gun laws that authorize such penalties. The Biden administration has vigorously defended the arbitrary, constitutionally dubious gun law that Hunter Biden violated, insisting that cannabis consumers are so untrustworthy and dangerous that the government is justified in threatening them with prison if they dare to exercise their Second Amendment rights. And in 2022, the president signed a law that increased the maximum penalty for drug users who possess firearms while creating an additional potential charge against them. Joe Biden also complains that prosecutors threw the book at his son after a proposed plea deal fell apart under judicial scrutiny last year. But that is par for the course when defendants insist on exercising their constitutional right to trial by jury. In the gun case, a single felony charge that Special Counsel David Weiss was initially prepared to drop after Hunter Biden completed a pretrial diversion program became three felony charges, all based on the same transaction. As a result, Biden faced up to 25 years in prison, quite a jump from zero time behind bars under the nixed diversion agreement. In the tax case, two misdemeanors became three felonies and six misdemeanors, all of which were covered by a guilty plea that Biden entered in September. That increased the maximum penalty to 17 years in a case where Weiss initially was prepared to recommend probation. The dramatic escalation in potential punishment vividly illustrated the “trial penalty” that prosecutors routinely impose on defendants who make the government prove its case. That threat helps explain why 97% of federal felony convictions are based on guilty pleas, a reality that transforms trial by jury from a promise to a fantasy. Related Articles Opinion Columnists | California politicians suddenly discover inflation in aftermath of election Opinion Columnists | How California ranks as the most active political state Opinion Columnists | Donald Trump must replace Pete Hegseth with Ron DeSantis Opinion Columnists | Larry Elder: Biden breaks his promise and pardons his son Opinion Columnists | California’s unaccountable homeless industrial complex A president cannot unilaterally change the laws that authorize draconian punishments for inchoate offenses and give prosecutors enormous power to coerce guilty pleas. But they can ameliorate the resulting injustices by exercising his clemency powers, which Joe Biden so far has largely failed to do. During his 2020 campaign, Biden promised that he would “use the president’s clemency power to secure the release of individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain non-violent and drug crimes.” But as of this week, he had received more than 10,500 petitions for commutations and granted just 132, or about 1%. That is roughly the same as Donald Trump’s rate and one-fifth Barack Obama’s. But Biden still has a few weeks to show that his mercy extends beyond his own kin. Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @jacobsullum.AP Business SummaryBrief at 6:15 p.m. EST

FIR Filed Against Prashant Kishor for Instigating BPSC ProtestNEW YORK — A Florida man has been arrested by the FBI on accusations of plotting to blow up the New York Stock Exchange, according to court documents filed Wednesday. Harun Abdul-Malik Yener was charged in Miami-Dade County with “attempting to use an improvised explosive device to damage or destroy a building used in interstate or foreign commerce,” prosecutors wrote in the criminal complaint. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.

Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and little-known Georgia governor who became the 39th president of the United States, promising “honest and decent” government to Watergate-weary Americans, and later returned to the world stage as an influential human rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died. He was 100. When his turbulent presidency ended after a stinging reelection loss in 1980, Carter retreated to Plains, his political career over. Over the four decades that followed, though, he forged a legacy of public service, building homes for the needy, monitoring elections around the globe and emerging as a fearless and sometimes controversial critic of governments that mistreated their citizens. He lived longer than any U.S. president in history and was still regularly teaching Bible classes at his hometown Maranatha Baptist Church well into his 90s. During his post-presidency, he also wrote more than 30 books, including fiction, poetry, deeply personal reflections on his faith, and commentaries on Middle East strife. Though slowed by battles with brain and liver cancer and a series of falls and hip replacement in recent years, he returned again and again to his charity work and continued to offer occasional political commentary, including in support of mail-in voting ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Carter was in his first term as Georgia governor when he launched his campaign to unseat President Gerald Ford in the 1976 election. At the time, the nation was still shaken by President Richard Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal and by the messy end of the Vietnam War. As a moderate Southern Democrat, a standard-bearer of what was then regarded as a more racially tolerant “new South,” Carter promised a government “as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.” But some of the traits that had helped get Carter elected — his willingness to take on the Washington establishment and his preference for practicality over ideology — didn’t serve him as well in the White House. He showed a deep understanding of policy, and a refreshing modesty and disregard for the ceremonial trappings of the office, but he was unable to make the legislative deals expected of a president. Even though his Democratic Party had a majority in Congress throughout his presidency, he was impatient with the legislative give-and-take and struggled to mobilize party leaders behind his policy initiatives. His presidency also was buffeted by domestic crises — rampant inflation and high unemployment, as well as interminable lines at gas stations triggered by a decline in the global oil supply exacerbated by Iran’s Islamic Revolution. “Looking back, I am struck by how many unpopular objectives we pursued,” Carter acknowledged in his 2010 book, “White House Diary.” “I was sometimes accused of ‘micromanaging’ the affairs of government and being excessively autocratic,” he continued, “and I must admit that my critics probably had a valid point.” Carter’s signature achievements as president were primarily on the international front, and included personally brokering the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, which have endured for more than 40 years. But it was another international crisis — the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries and the government’s inability to win the release of 52 Americans taken hostage — that would cast a long shadow on his presidency and his bid for reelection. Carter authorized a secret military mission to rescue the hostages in April 1980, but it was aborted at the desert staging area; during the withdrawal, eight servicemen were killed when a helicopter crashed into a transport aircraft. The hostages were held for 444 days, a period that spanned Carter’s final 15 months in the White House. They were finally freed the day his successor, Ronald Reagan, took the oath of office. Near the end of Carter’s presidency, one poll put his job approval rating at 21% — lower than Nixon’s when he resigned in disgrace and among the lowest of any White House occupant since World War II. In a rarity for an incumbent president, Carter faced a formidable primary challenge in 1980 from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a favorite of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. Although Carter prevailed, his nomination was in doubt until the party’s August convention. The enmity between Carter and Kennedy, two of the most important Democratic political figures of their generation, continued throughout their lives. In Kennedy’s memoir, published shortly after his death in 2009, he called Carter petty and guilty of “a failure to listen.” While promoting the publication of “White House Diary,” Carter said Kennedy had “deliberately” blocked Carter’s comprehensive healthcare proposals in the late 1970s in hopes of defeating the president in the primary. In the 1980 general election, Carter faced Reagan, then 69, who campaigned on a promise to increase military spending and rescue the economy by cutting taxes and decreasing regulation. Carter lost in a 51% to 41% thumping — he won just six states and the District of Columbia — that devastated the man known for his toothy smile and sent him back to his hometown, an ex-president at 56. A year later, he and Rosalynn founded the Carter Center, which pressed for peaceful solutions to world conflicts, promoted human rights and worked to eradicate disease in the poorest nations. The center, based in Atlanta, launched a new phase of Carter’s public life, one that would move the same historians who called Carter a weak president to label him one of America’s greatest former leaders. His post-presidential years were both “historic and polarizing,” as Princeton University historian Julian E. Zelizer put it in a 2010 biography of Carter. Zelizer said Carter “refused to be constrained politically when pursuing his international agenda” as an ex-president, and became “an enormously powerful figure on the international stage.” When Carter appeared on “The Colbert Report” in 2014, host Stephen Colbert asked him, “You invented the idea of the post-presidency. What inspired you to do that?” “I didn’t have anything else to do,” Carter replied. He traveled widely to mediate conflicts and monitor elections around the world, joined Habitat for Humanity to promote “sweat equity” for low-income homeownership, and became a blunt critic of human rights abuses. He angered conservatives and some liberals by advocating negotiations with autocrats — and his criticism of Israeli leaders and support for Palestinian self-determination angered many Jews. A prolific author, Carter covered a range of topics, including the Middle East crisis and the virtues of aging and religion. He penned a memoir on growing up in the rural South as well as a book of poems, and he was the first president to write a novel — “The Hornet’s Nest,” about the South during the Revolutionary War. He won three Grammy Awards as well for best spoken-word album, most recently in 2019 for “Faith: A Journey For All.” As with many former presidents, Carter’s popularity rose in the years after he left office. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts” and to advance democracy and human rights. By then, two-thirds of Americans said they approved of his presidency. “Jimmy Carter may never be rated a great president,” wrote Charles O. Jones, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, in his chronicle of the Carter presidency. “Yet it will be difficult in the long run to sustain censure of a president motivated to do what is right.” :::: The journey for James Earl Carter Jr. began on Oct. 1, 1924, in the tiny Sumter County, Georgia, town of Plains, home to fewer than 600 people in 2020. He was the first president born in a hospital, but he lived in a house without electricity or indoor plumbing until he was a teenager. His ancestors had been in Georgia for more than two centuries, and he was the fifth generation to own and farm the same land. His father, James Earl Carter Sr., known as Mr. Earl, was a strict disciplinarian and a conservative businessman of some means. His mother, known as Miss Lillian, had more liberal views — she was known for her charity work and for taking in transients and treating Black residents with kindness. (At the age of 70, she joined the Peace Corps, working in India.) Inspired by an uncle who was in the Navy, Carter decided as a first-grader that he wanted to go to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He became the first member of his family to finish high school, then attended Georgia Tech before heading for the academy, where he studied engineering and graduated in 1946, 59th in a class of 820. Before his last year in Annapolis, while home for the summer, he met Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister Ruth’s. He and a friend invited the two young women to the movies, and when he returned home that night, he told his mother he had met “the girl I want to marry.” He proposed that Christmas, but Rosalynn declined because she felt she was too young (she was 18 and a sophomore in college). Several weeks later, while she was visiting Carter at the academy, he asked again. This time she said yes. Carter applied to America’s new nuclear-powered submarine program under the command of the icy and demanding Capt. (later Adm.) Hyman Rickover. During Carter’s interview, Rickover asked whether he had done his best at Annapolis. “I started to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ but ... I recalled several of the many times at the Academy when I could have learned more about our allies, our enemies, weapons, strategy and so forth,” Carter wrote in his autobiography. “... I finally gulped and said, ‘No, sir, I didn’t always do my best.’” To which Rickover replied: “Why not?” Carter got the job, and would later make “Why not the best?” his campaign slogan. The Carters had three sons, who all go by nicknames — John William “Jack,” James Earl “Chip” and Donnel Jeffrey “Jeff.” Carter and Rosalynn had wanted to have more children, but an obstetrician said that surgery Rosalynn had to remove a tumor on her uterus would make that impossible. Fifteen years after Jeffrey was born, the Carters had a daughter, Amy, who “made us young again,” Carter would later write. While in the Navy, Carter took graduate courses in nuclear physics and served as a submariner on the USS Pomfret. But his military career was cut short when his father died, and he moved back to Georgia in 1953 to help run the family business, which was in disarray. In his first year back on the farm, Carter turned a profit of less than $200, the equivalent of about $2,200 today. But with Rosalynn’s help, he expanded the business. In addition to farming 3,100 acres, the family soon operated a seed and fertilizer business, warehouses, a peanut-shelling plant and a cotton gin. By the time he began his campaign for the White House 20 years later, Carter had a net worth of about $800,000, and the revenue from his enterprises was more than $2 million a year. Carter entered electoral politics in 1962, and asked voters to call him “Jimmy.” He ran for a seat in the Georgia Senate against an incumbent backed by a local political boss who stuffed the ballot box. Trailing by 139 votes after the primary, Carter waged a furious legal battle, which he described years later in his book “Turning Point.” Carter got a recount, the primary result was reversed, and he went on to win the general election. The victory was a defining moment for Carter, the outsider committed to fairness and honesty who had successfully battled establishment politicians corrupted by their ties to special interests. In two terms in the Georgia Senate, Carter established a legislative record that was socially progressive and fiscally conservative. He first ran for governor in 1966, but finished third in the primary. Over the next four years, he made 1,800 speeches and shook hands with an estimated 600,000 people — a style of campaigning that paid off in the 1970 gubernatorial election and later in his bid for the White House. In his inaugural address as governor in 1971, Carter made national news by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” He had a portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. hung in a hall at the Capitol in Atlanta. But when Carter launched his official campaign for the White House in December 1974, he was still so little-known outside Georgia that a celebrity panel on the TV show “What’s My Line?” couldn’t identify him. In the beginning, many scoffed at the temerity of a peanut farmer and one-term governor running for the highest office in the land. After Carter met with House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., the speaker was asked whom he had been talking to. “Some fellow named Jimmy Carter from Georgia. Says he’s running for president,” O’Neill replied. In a meeting with editors of the Los Angeles Times in 1975, Carter said he planned to gain the presidency by building a network of supporters and by giving his candidacy an early boost by winning the Iowa caucuses. Until then, Iowa had been a bit player in the nominating process, mostly ignored by strategists. But Carter’s victory there vaulted him to front-runner status — and Iowa into a major role in presidential nominations. His emergence from the pack of Democratic hopefuls was helped by the release of his well-reviewed autobiography “Why Not the Best?” in which he described his upbringing on the farm and his traditional moral values. On the campaign trail, Carter came across as refreshingly candid and even innocent — an antidote to the atmosphere of scandal that had eroded confidence in public officials since the events leading to Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. A Baptist Sunday school teacher, Carter was among the first presidential candidates to embrace the label of born-again Christian. That was underscored when, in an interview with Playboy magazine, he made headlines by admitting, “I’ve looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.” Carter had emerged from the Democratic National Convention in July with a wide lead over Ford, Nixon’s vice president and successor, but by the time of the Playboy interview in September, his numbers were tumbling. By election day, the contest was a dead heat. Carter, running on a ticket with Walter F. Mondale for his vice president, eked out a victory with one of the narrower margins in U.S. presidential history, winning 50.1% to 48% of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes, 27 more than needed. Many of Carter’s supporters hoped he would usher in a new era of liberal policies. But he saw his role as more of a problem-solver than a politician, and as an outsider who promised to shake things up in Washington, he often acted unilaterally. A few weeks into his term, Carter announced that he was cutting off federal funding to 18 water projects around the country to save money and protect the environment. Lawmakers, surprised by the assault on their pet projects, were livid. He ultimately backed down on some of the cuts. But his relationship with Congress never fully healed. Members often complained that they couldn’t get in to see him, and that when they did he was in a rush to show them the door. His relationship with the media, as he acknowledged later in life, was similarly fraught. Carter’s image as a reformer also took a hit early in his presidency after he appointed Bert Lance, a longtime confidant, to head the Office of Management and Budget. Within months of the appointment, questions were raised about Lance’s personal financial affairs as a Georgia banker. Adamant that Lance had done nothing wrong, Carter dug in his heels and publicly told his friend, “Bert, I’m proud of you.” Still, Lance resigned under pressure, and although he was later acquitted of criminal charges, the damage to Carter had been done. As Mondale later put it: “It made people realize that we were no different than anybody else.” When Carter did score legislative victories, the cost was high. In 1978, he pushed the Senate to ratify the Panama Canal treaties to eventually hand control of the canal over to Panama. But conservatives criticized the move as a diminution of U.S. strength, and even the Democratic National Committee declined to endorse it. Carter’s most significant foreign policy accomplishment was the 1978 Camp David agreement, a peace pact between Israel and Egypt. But he followed that with several unpopular moves, including his decree that the United States would not participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, as a protest against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was the only time in Olympic history that the United States had boycotted an Olympics; the Soviets responded by boycotting the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Carter had taken a series of largely symbolic steps to dispel the imperial image of the presidency. After he took the oath of office on a wintry day, he and the new first lady emerged from their motorcade and walked part of the way from the Capitol to the White House. He ended chauffeur-driven cars for top staff members, sold the presidential yacht, went to the White House mess hall for lunch with the staff and conducted town meetings around the country. He suspended the playing of “Hail to the Chief” whenever he arrived at an event, though he later allowed the practice to resume. On the domestic front, he was saddled with a country in crisis. Inflation galloped at rates up to 14%, and global gasoline shortages closed service stations and created high prices and long lines. Interest rates for home mortgages soared above 14%. In his first televised fireside chat, he wore a cardigan sweater and encouraged Americans to conserve energy during the winter by keeping their thermostats at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night. He also proposed a string of legislative initiatives to deal with the crisis, but many were blocked by Congress. In what would become a seminal moment in his presidency, Carter addressed the nation — and a television audience of more than 60 million — on a Sunday evening in 1979, saying the country had been seized by a “crisis of confidence ... that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” He outlined a series of proposals to develop new sources of energy. The address, widely known as the “malaise speech” even though Carter never used that word, was generally well-received at the time, though some bristled at the implication that Americans were to blame for the country’s problems. Any positive glow disappeared two days later, when Carter fired five of his top officials, including the Energy, Treasury and Transportation secretaries and his attorney general. The value of the dollar sank and the stock market tumbled. Sensing that Carter was politically vulnerable, Kennedy moved to present himself as an alternative for the 1980 Democratic nomination, publicly criticizing the president’s agenda. But Kennedy damaged his own candidacy in a prime-time interview with CBS’ Roger Mudd: Asked why he was running for president, Kennedy fumbled his answer, and critics cited it as evidence that the senator didn’t want the job so much as he felt obligated to seek it. A few months after the malaise speech, in late 1979, revolutionaries loyal to Iran’s spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. Weeks stretched into months, with Iran refusing all efforts to negotiate a hostage release. In April 1980, Carter approved Operation Eagle Claw, a secret Delta Force rescue mission. But it ended in disaster — mechanical trouble sidelined three helicopters and, after the mission was aborted, one of the remaining helicopters collided with a transport plane on the ground, killing eight soldiers. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance resigned before the mission, believing the plan too risky. Negotiations to free the hostages resumed, and Carter desperately tried to win their release before the November election. But the Iranians prolonged the talks and the hostages weren’t released until Jan. 20, 1981, moments after Carter watched Reagan being sworn in. The journey home for Carter was painful. Of those who voted for Reagan in 1980, nearly 1 in 4 said they were primarily motivated by their dissatisfaction with Carter. :::: Carter faced “an altogether new, unwanted and potentially empty life,” as he later put it. He sold the family farm-supply business, which had been placed in a blind trust during his presidency and was by then deeply in debt. Then, as Rosalynn later recalled, Carter awoke one night with an idea to build not just a presidential library but a place to resolve global conflicts. Together, they founded the nonprofit, nonpartisan Carter Center. His skill as a mediator made Carter a ready choice for future presidents seeking envoys to navigate crises. Republican President George H.W. Bush sent him on peace missions to Ethiopia and Sudan, and President Bill Clinton, a fellow Democrat, dispatched him to North Korea, Haiti and what then was Yugoslavia. Carter described his relationship with President Barack Obama as chilly, however, in part because he had openly criticized the administration’s policies toward Israel. He felt Obama did not strongly enough support a separate Palestinian state. “Every president has been a very powerful factor here in advocating this two-state solution,” Carter told the New York Times in 2012. “That is now not apparent.” As an election observer, he called them as he saw them. After monitoring presidential voting in Panama in 1989, he declared that Manuel Noriega had rigged the election. He also began building houses worldwide for Habitat for Humanity, and he wrote prodigiously. The Nobel committee awarded Carter the Peace Prize in 2002, more than two decades after he left the White House, praising him for standing by “the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation.” During his 70s, 80s and even into his 90s, the former president showed an energy that never failed to impress those around him. In his 1998 book “The Virtues of Aging,” he urged retirees to remain active and engaged, and he followed his own advice, continuing to jog, play tennis and go fly-fishing well into his 80s. When his “White House Diary” was published in 2010, he embarked on a nationwide book tour at 85, as he did in 2015 with the publication of “A Full Life: Reflections at 90.” When he told America he had cancer that had spread to his liver and brain, it was vintage Carter. Wearing a coat and tie and a pair of blue jeans, he stared into the television cameras and was unflinchingly blunt about his prognosis. “Hope for the best; accept what comes,” he said. “I think I have been as blessed as any human being in the world.” Former Times staff writers Jack Nelson, Robert Shogan and Johanna Neuman contributed to this report. ©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com . Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Juan Soto could decide on his next team before or during baseball's winter meetings

Nanaia Mahuta was honoured at the Labour Party conference with a life membership. Photo: RNZ By Lillian Hanley of RNZ Former Labour minister and Hauraki-Waikato MP Nanaia Mahuta says it is an "important" and "exciting" time to be "re-entering" politics. She made the comments during her first public appearance with the party since its election defeat last year. During the party conference in Christchurch on Saturday, Mahuta's 27 years of service was honoured and she was presented with a life membership. Leader Chris Hipkins handed over the award to acknowledge, thank and celebrate an "outstanding member of the Labour whānau and an extraordinary New Zealander". He said she had dedicated her life to being a "servant of the people" and was a "true source of hope, vision and aspiration". Hipkins spoke of Mahuta's work establishing Māori wards and working to implement the Three Waters policy, which saw her face "outright racism" as a result. In accepting the award, Mahuta spoke to members who she said gave her the "great honour of serving a party I believe in". "I am here because of you, the faithful members of the Labour Party who continue to fight the fight day in, day out, for the values that we all believe in." Those were social justice, workable solutions to address inequity and poverty, and building a shared vision for the country, she said. She told the audience to look around the room, "look at the person next to you". "This is New Zealand. This is the New Zealand we want, for our tamariki, for our mokopuna, and it embraces everybody." She encouraged the audience to support the current Labour caucus, "charged with the responsibility of navigating a political system that has to bring everybody with us, whether they voted for us or not". One year on It was the first party-related event Mahuta had attended since taking a year off after losing her seat at the last election. Mahuta told RNZ it was great to "re-enter" the political perspective of the Labour Party one year on. "I gave myself one year post the election to be able to reflect on the 27 years that I've spent serving, and I needed that time for me." But she said she had come back specifically to ensure the party delivered a Labour government that could support the types of issues she believed were core to New Zealand. "For example, Te Tiriti in its place within the constitutional foundation of this country is not negotiable, and it's important to me that Labour continues to ensure that that is the case, and they're doing that." It was an "exciting time" to be re-entering politics, but that it was important as well, she said. When asked if she would be running in the next general election, she said that was not her "intention". "My intention is to be able to support a strong Labour bid to earn the trust of voters to say, 'this is what we stand for'." She said it was going to be a "battle" to pitch in 2026 in a way that would convince a broad range of people that "there's nothing to fear from having a strong foundation and vision for our future". Over the past year, she felt Labour had been more emboldened to say it did stand for "Treaty-based decision making", which would lead to a path of building "our sense of national identity and who we are as a country", she said. That was "unlike the others who want to turn the clock back and want to put all of this in question". Reflecting on the previous term, she said while she was proud of Labour's achievements, it might have "tried to do too much in the period of time that we had the opportunity to govern". "We have to reflect on that. We have to show the constituents and the voters of New Zealand that, on questions like CGT, we've got to take people with us. So that's our aim now, is to build the constituency of support to go forward." Mahuta was unseated in Hauraki-Waikato by Te Pāti Māori's Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, who recently started a haka in Parliament's debating chamber during the first reading of the controversial Treaty Principles Bill. Maipi-Clarke was young, and "her passion should be applauded to the extent that she is not defined by an opinion of what's not right", Mahuta said. "She has been growing in a community of being positively and confidently, Māori, Waikato, Ngāpuhi and everything that she can whakapapa too. That's important, and that's the generation that my kids are growing up in." The important task ahead for Maipi-Clarke was to develop her skill set to "translate that into political capital that delivers to her people", and she should be given "time to grow that talent", Mahuta said. "There's one thing doing the haka, there's another thing delivering to her electorate. "The threshold of expectation is to deliver. It's not what you say, it's what you do."

Even with access to blockbuster obesity drugs, some people don't lose weightSAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s federal police on Thursday formally accused former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people of attempting a coup to keep him in office after his defeat in the 2022 elections. Police said their sealed findings were being delivered Thursday to Brazil’s Supreme Court, which will refer them to Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet, who decides either to formally charge Bolsonaro and put him on trial, or toss the investigation. Bolsonaro told the website Metropoles that he was waiting for his lawyer to review the accusation, reportedly about 700 pages long. But he said he would fight the case and dismissed the investigation as being the result of “creativity.” The former right-wing president has denied all claims he tried to stay in office after his narrow electoral defeat in 2022 to his rival, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has faced a series of legal threats since then. Police said in a brief statement that the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were accused “to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news.” Dozens of former and current Bolsonaro aides also were accused, including Gen. Walter Braga Netto, who was his running mate in the 2022 campaign; former Army commander Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; Valdemar Costa Neto, the chairman of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party; and his veteran former adviser, Gen. Augusto Heleno. Other investigations produced formal accusations of Bolsonaro’s roles in smuggling diamond jewelry into Brazil without properly declaring them and in directing a subordinate to falsify his and others’ COVID-19 vaccination statuses. Bolsonaro has denied any involvement in either. Another probe found that he had abused his authority to cast doubt on the country’s voting system, and judges barred him from running again until 2030. Still, he has insisted that he will run in 2026, and many in his orbit were heartened by the recent U.S. election win of Donald Trump, despite his own swirling legal threats. But the far-reaching investigations already have weakened Bolsonaro’s status as a leader of Brazil’s right wing, said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo. “Bolsonaro is already barred from running in the 2026 elections,” Melo told the The Associated Press. “And if he is convicted he could also be jailed by then. To avoid being behind bars, he will have to convince Supreme Court justices that he has nothing to do with a plot that involves dozens of his aides. That’s a very tall order,” Melo said. A formal accusation of an attempted coup means the investigation has gathered indications of “a crime and its author,” said Eloísa Machado de Almeida, a law professor at Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo. She said she believed there was enough legal grounds for the prosecutor-general to file charges. Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress have been negotiating a bill to pardon individuals who stormed the Brazilian capital and rioted on Jan. 8, 2023 in a failed attempt to keep the former president in power. Analysts have speculated that lawmakers want to extend the legislation to cover the former president himself. However, efforts to push a broad amnesty bill may be “politically challenging” given recent attacks on the judiciary and details emerging in investigations, Machado said. On Tuesday, Federal Police arrested four military and a Federal Police officer, accused of plotting to assassinate Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as a means to overthrow the government following the 2022 elections. And last week, a man carried out a bomb attack in the capital Brasilia . He attempted to enter the Supreme Court and threw explosives outside, killing himself.