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New highway webcams between Langford, Sooke provide snapshots of road, weather conditionsPLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Newly married and sworn as a Naval officer, Jimmy Carter left his tiny hometown in 1946 hoping to climb the ranks and see the world. Less than a decade later, the death of his father and namesake, a merchant farmer and local politician who went by “Mr. Earl,” prompted the submariner and his wife, Rosalynn, to return to the rural life of Plains, Georgia, they thought they’d escaped. The lieutenant never would be an admiral. Instead, he became commander in chief. Years after his presidency ended in humbling defeat, he would add a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded not for his White House accomplishments but “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The life of James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th and longest-lived U.S. president, ended Sunday at the age of 100 where it began: Plains, the town of 600 that fueled his political rise, welcomed him after his fall and sustained him during 40 years of service that redefined what it means to be a former president. With the stubborn confidence of an engineer and an optimism rooted in his Baptist faith, Carter described his motivations in politics and beyond in the same way: an almost missionary zeal to solve problems and improve lives. Carter was raised amid racism, abject poverty and hard rural living — realities that shaped both his deliberate politics and emphasis on human rights. “He always felt a responsibility to help people,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend of Carter's in Plains. “And when he couldn’t make change wherever he was, he decided he had to go higher.” Carter's path, a mix of happenstance and calculation , pitted moral imperatives against political pragmatism; and it defied typical labels of American politics, especially caricatures of one-term presidents as failures. “We shouldn’t judge presidents by how popular they are in their day. That's a very narrow way of assessing them," Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Associated Press. “We should judge them by how they changed the country and the world for the better. On that score, Jimmy Carter is not in the first rank of American presidents, but he stands up quite well.” Later in life, Carter conceded that many Americans, even those too young to remember his tenure, judged him ineffective for failing to contain inflation or interest rates, end the energy crisis or quickly bring home American hostages in Iran. He gained admirers instead for his work at The Carter Center — advocating globally for public health, human rights and democracy since 1982 — and the decades he and Rosalynn wore hardhats and swung hammers with Habitat for Humanity. Yet the common view that he was better after the Oval Office than in it annoyed Carter, and his allies relished him living long enough to see historians reassess his presidency. “He doesn’t quite fit in today’s terms” of a left-right, red-blue scoreboard, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the former president multiple times during his own White House bid. At various points in his political career, Carter labeled himself “progressive” or “conservative” — sometimes both at once. His most ambitious health care bill failed — perhaps one of his biggest legislative disappointments — because it didn’t go far enough to suit liberals. Republicans, especially after his 1980 defeat, cast him as a left-wing cartoon. It would be easiest to classify Carter as a centrist, Buttigieg said, “but there’s also something radical about the depth of his commitment to looking after those who are left out of society and out of the economy.” Indeed, Carter’s legacy is stitched with complexities, contradictions and evolutions — personal and political. The self-styled peacemaker was a war-trained Naval Academy graduate who promised Democratic challenger Ted Kennedy that he’d “kick his ass.” But he campaigned with a call to treat everyone with “respect and compassion and with love.” Carter vowed to restore America’s virtue after the shame of Vietnam and Watergate, and his technocratic, good-government approach didn't suit Republicans who tagged government itself as the problem. It also sometimes put Carter at odds with fellow Democrats. The result still was a notable legislative record, with wins on the environment, education, and mental health care. He dramatically expanded federally protected lands, began deregulating air travel, railroads and trucking, and he put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. As a fiscal hawk, Carter added a relative pittance to the national debt, unlike successors from both parties. Carter nonetheless struggled to make his achievements resonate with the electorate he charmed in 1976. Quoting Bob Dylan and grinning enthusiastically, he had promised voters he would “never tell a lie.” Once in Washington, though, he led like a joyless engineer, insisting his ideas would become reality and he'd be rewarded politically if only he could convince enough people with facts and logic. This served him well at Camp David, where he brokered peace between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Epypt’s Anwar Sadat, an experience that later sparked the idea of The Carter Center in Atlanta. Carter's tenacity helped the center grow to a global force that monitored elections across five continents, enabled his freelance diplomacy and sent public health experts across the developing world. The center’s wins were personal for Carter, who hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite, and nearly did. As president, though, the approach fell short when he urged consumers beleaguered by energy costs to turn down their thermostats. Or when he tried to be the nation’s cheerleader, beseeching Americans to overcome a collective “crisis of confidence.” Republican Ronald Reagan exploited Carter's lecturing tone with a belittling quip in their lone 1980 debate. “There you go again,” the former Hollywood actor said in response to a wonky answer from the sitting president. “The Great Communicator” outpaced Carter in all but six states. Carter later suggested he “tried to do too much, too soon” and mused that he was incompatible with Washington culture: media figures, lobbyists and Georgetown social elites who looked down on the Georgians and their inner circle as “country come to town.” Carter carefully navigated divides on race and class on his way to the Oval Office. Born Oct. 1, 1924 , Carter was raised in the mostly Black community of Archery, just outside Plains, by a progressive mother and white supremacist father. Their home had no running water or electricity but the future president still grew up with the relative advantages of a locally prominent, land-owning family in a system of Jim Crow segregation. He wrote of President Franklin Roosevelt’s towering presence and his family’s Democratic Party roots, but his father soured on FDR, and Jimmy Carter never campaigned or governed as a New Deal liberal. He offered himself as a small-town peanut farmer with an understated style, carrying his own luggage, bunking with supporters during his first presidential campaign and always using his nickname. And he began his political career in a whites-only Democratic Party. As private citizens, he and Rosalynn supported integration as early as the 1950s and believed it inevitable. Carter refused to join the White Citizens Council in Plains and spoke out in his Baptist church against denying Black people access to worship services. “This is not my house; this is not your house,” he said in a churchwide meeting, reminding fellow parishioners their sanctuary belonged to God. Yet as the appointed chairman of Sumter County schools he never pushed to desegregate, thinking it impractical after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision. And while presidential candidate Carter would hail the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson when Carter was a state senator, there is no record of Carter publicly supporting it at the time. Carter overcame a ballot-stuffing opponent to win his legislative seat, then lost the 1966 governor's race to an arch-segregationist. He won four years later by avoiding explicit mentions of race and campaigning to the right of his rival, who he mocked as “Cufflinks Carl” — the insult of an ascendant politician who never saw himself as part the establishment. Carter’s rural and small-town coalition in 1970 would match any victorious Republican electoral map in 2024. Once elected, though, Carter shocked his white conservative supporters — and landed on the cover of Time magazine — by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Before making the jump to Washington, Carter befriended the family of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whom he’d never sought out as he eyed the governor’s office. Carter lamented his foot-dragging on school integration as a “mistake.” But he also met, conspicuously, with Alabama's segregationist Gov. George Wallace to accept his primary rival's endorsement ahead of the 1976 Democratic convention. “He very shrewdly took advantage of his own Southerness,” said Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor and expert on Carter’s campaigns. A coalition of Black voters and white moderate Democrats ultimately made Carter the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South. Then, just as he did in Georgia, he used his power in office to appoint more non-whites than all his predecessors had, combined. He once acknowledged “the secret shame” of white Americans who didn’t fight segregation. But he also told Alter that doing more would have sacrificed his political viability – and thus everything he accomplished in office and after. King's daughter, Bernice King, described Carter as wisely “strategic” in winning higher offices to enact change. “He was a leader of conscience,” she said in an interview. Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19 at the age of 96, was identified by both husband and wife as the “more political” of the pair; she sat in on Cabinet meetings and urged him to postpone certain priorities, like pressing the Senate to relinquish control of the Panama Canal. “Let that go until the second term,” she would sometimes say. The president, recalled her former aide Kathy Cade, retorted that he was “going to do what’s right” even if “it might cut short the time I have.” Rosalynn held firm, Cade said: “She’d remind him you have to win to govern.” Carter also was the first president to appoint multiple women as Cabinet officers. Yet by his own telling, his career sprouted from chauvinism in the Carters' early marriage: He did not consult Rosalynn when deciding to move back to Plains in 1953 or before launching his state Senate bid a decade later. Many years later, he called it “inconceivable” that he didn’t confer with the woman he described as his “full partner,” at home, in government and at The Carter Center. “We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn Carter told AP in 2021. So deep was their trust that when Carter remained tethered to the White House in 1980 as 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, it was Rosalynn who campaigned on her husband’s behalf. “I just loved it,” she said, despite the bitterness of defeat. Fair or not, the label of a disastrous presidency had leading Democrats keep their distance, at least publicly, for many years, but Carter managed to remain relevant, writing books and weighing in on societal challenges. He lamented widening wealth gaps and the influence of money in politics. He voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later declared that America had devolved from fully functioning democracy to “oligarchy.” Yet looking ahead to 2020, with Sanders running again, Carter warned Democrats not to “move to a very liberal program,” lest they help re-elect President Donald Trump. Carter scolded the Republican for his serial lies and threats to democracy, and chided the U.S. establishment for misunderstanding Trump’s populist appeal. He delighted in yearly convocations with Emory University freshmen, often asking them to guess how much he’d raised in his two general election campaigns. “Zero,” he’d gesture with a smile, explaining the public financing system candidates now avoid so they can raise billions. Carter still remained quite practical in partnering with wealthy corporations and foundations to advance Carter Center programs. Carter recognized that economic woes and the Iran crisis doomed his presidency, but offered no apologies for appointing Paul Volcker as the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate hikes would not curb inflation until Reagan's presidency. He was proud of getting all the hostages home without starting a shooting war, even though Tehran would not free them until Reagan's Inauguration Day. “Carter didn’t look at it” as a failure, Alter emphasized. “He said, ‘They came home safely.’ And that’s what he wanted.” Well into their 90s, the Carters greeted visitors at Plains’ Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday School and where he will have his last funeral before being buried on family property alongside Rosalynn . Carter, who made the congregation’s collection plates in his woodworking shop, still garnered headlines there, calling for women’s rights within religious institutions, many of which, he said, “subjugate” women in church and society. Carter was not one to dwell on regrets. “I am at peace with the accomplishments, regret the unrealized goals and utilize my former political position to enhance everything we do,” he wrote around his 90th birthday. The politician who had supposedly hated Washington politics also enjoyed hosting Democratic presidential contenders as public pilgrimages to Plains became advantageous again. Carter sat with Buttigieg for the final time March 1, 2020, hours before the Indiana mayor ended his campaign and endorsed eventual winner Joe Biden. “He asked me how I thought the campaign was going,” Buttigieg said, recalling that Carter flashed his signature grin and nodded along as the young candidate, born a year after Carter left office, “put the best face” on the walloping he endured the day before in South Carolina. Never breaking his smile, the 95-year-old host fired back, “I think you ought to drop out.” “So matter of fact,” Buttigieg said with a laugh. “It was somehow encouraging.” Carter had lived enough, won plenty and lost enough to take the long view. “He talked a lot about coming from nowhere,” Buttigieg said, not just to attain the presidency but to leverage “all of the instruments you have in life” and “make the world more peaceful.” In his farewell address as president, Carter said as much to the country that had embraced and rejected him. “The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language,” he declared. “Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity and who suffer for the sake of justice — they are the patriots of this cause.” Carter pledged to remain engaged with and for them as he returned “home to the South where I was born and raised,” home to Plains, where that young lieutenant had indeed become “a fellow citizen of the world.” —- Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.
Amazon is doubling its investment in Anthropic to $8 billion in a deepened collaboration on artificial intelligence, the companies said Friday. The e-commerce and technology behemoth will remain a minority investor in Anthropic, having pumped an initial $4 billion into the artificial intelligence developer late last year and becoming its primary cloud computing provider. "The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," said Matt Garman, chief of AWS cloud computing division. "We'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies." Amazon is investing the additional $4 billion in Anthropic as part of an expanded alliance that includes working together on "Trainium" hardware to optimize machine learning, according to the companies. "We're looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology," said Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. The announcement came just days after Britain's competition regulator cleared Google-parent Alphabet's investment in Anthropic, following a probe. The Competition and Markets Authority concluded that the big tech giant had not acquired "material influence" over Anthropic as a result of the deal, which was reported to have cost $2 billion. The British regulator is one of several global regulators concerned with reining in big tech companies and their partnerships with AI firms. In September, the CMA cleared Amazon's initial investment in Anthropic, saying it did not believe that "a relevant merger situation has been created." gc/mlm( MENAFN - Caribbean News Global) SAN FRANCISCO, USA – Maury Blackman, a seasoned entrepreneur and advocate for high-growth technology ecosystems, has released a compelling article urging US policymakers to reform the H-1B visa program. Blackman, who has led transformative companies in the civic-tech and market intelligence sectors, warns that America's ability to compete globally is at risk without a strategic overhaul of its skilled immigration policies. In his article, Why Reforming the H-1B Visa Program Is Critical for America's Future , Blackman highlights the critical role skilled immigrants play in fueling America's innovation economy. He draws from personal experience, recounting how his own business was significantly impacted when an engineer with advanced degrees from MIT and Stanford had to leave the country due to visa restrictions. “Every year, we educate the best and brightest minds from around the world at our top universities, only to send them packing when they're ready to contribute to our economy,” Blackman writes.“This isn't just bad policy – it's economic malpractice.” The article underscores the urgent need to reform the H-1B visa program, including eliminating arbitrary caps, replacing the lottery system with a merit-based approach, and providing a clear pathway to permanent residency for individuals with advanced technical degrees. Blackman emphasizes that skilled immigrants don't just fill jobs – they create them, launching businesses and driving technological breakthroughs that benefit the broader economy. “Skilled immigration is not just about fairness to immigrants – it's about securing America's future,” Blackman says.“If someone graduates from a top university with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence or biotechnology, we should be doing everything in our power to keep them here, not send them home to compete against us.” Blackman also calls for bipartisan cooperation on this issue, noting that H-1B visa reform is a rare opportunity for Democrats and Republicans to come together for the good of the country. “This is one area where I hope Democrats and the Trump administration can work together,” he adds.“It would be a huge win for our economy, our innovation leadership, and our future as a global powerhouse.” As a respected voice in the tech and investment communities, Blackman's advocacy for H-1B reform is expected to resonate with industry leaders, policymakers, and anyone invested in America's economic growth. – Maury Blackman has led high-growth technology companies for more than 25 years, including as CEO of Accela and Premise Data. Recognized as a Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, Blackman is an active investor and advisor to technology firms and the managing director of Pierpoint Ventures. The post Why reforming the H-1B Visa program is critical for America's future appeared first on Caribbean News Global . MENAFN29122024000232011072ID1109040093 Legal Disclaimer: MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.
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Inside OnlyFans: The Rise, Influence, and Controversies of the Billion-Dollar Adult PlatformOctave scores 24 as Stony Brook takes down Maine 74-72Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com. In the early 1990s, while attending graduate school at Antioch in Keene, I fell in love with the work of the social worker Lynn Hoffman. She made it clear that she disliked abstract psychological theories, preferring to discuss human creativity and the art of participating in bonds with others. She spurned conventional thinking that emphasizes hierarchies and rigid sociological systems. She was interested in promoting neighborly ways of being, something desperately needed in our nation, which is so polarized that some pundits warn of civil war. She was ahead of her time, rejecting the conventional metaphor that family therapy was a top-down hierarchy like the structure of a tree. She also repudiated the notion that the family was a mechanistically determined system. Rather than based on a machine, she looked for a more interactive model, as such found in the patterns of nature. She found what she was looking for in the work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who had proposed “rhizome” as a new metaphor based on the complex branching stem of fungi we now call mycelium. Because mycelia have no center, they are neither a rigid system derived from technology nor a tree that grows from top to bottom by predictable branching. As described by Professor Katina Rogers : “The rhizome model is a contrast to the traditional model of thought, which is often structured like a tree... In the rhizome model, there is no single point of origin or fixed center, but instead, a multitude of entry and exit points. The rhizome is not a unified whole, but a network of interconnections and flows that can be constantly reconfigured.” For Hoffman, the rhizome was more than an apt metaphor for family therapy: it was an exciting new paradigm for society . By “moving beyond hierarchical and mechanical models to a pulsing aliveness,” it represented the future, what Hoffman predicted would become known as the Rhizome Century. Article continues after... Cross|Word Flipart Typeshift SpellTower Really Bad Chess What Hoffman foresaw was the gradual breakdown of conventional politics in our country and around the world in a radical move away from the system metaphor , “with its emphasis on symmetry, order and a return to the same, to the rhizome with its more messy and horizontal plane of endless relations.” Back at the beginning of social media in 2008, Hoffman called the World Wide Web a classic example of a rhizome. “The internet was already sprouting movements, formats, patterns, that are questioning, evading, and uprooting many of the gatekeeping structures that support our Modernist society.” The first stirrings were movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, which were quickly squashed by the status quo. I think the recent rise of authoritarianism is, at least in part, a backlash against this surge of “people power.” Unfortunately, in our country, Trump has hijacked the aspirations of the people for his own corrupt ends. But it will not last. The Rhizome Century that Hoffman predicted is now upon us. As Peggy Sax, a collaborator of Hoffman, has written. “In the future, what counts as an ethical response will require an entirely different focus of attention. It will mean starting on the grassroots level to listen and learn from our neighbors, rather than dictating or deferring to what the experts say: to grow “our attentiveness to and curiosity about what it might mean within a locally and historically situated life - to live an interconnected life with a sense of purpose and meaning.” Nation Magazine, in its January issue, has highlighted one such approach to combat the upcoming Trump agenda: Straight out of the Lynn Hoffman playbook, adrienne maree brown has begun what she calls “mycelial organizing.” As she puts it: “Put your nose down in the dirt and understand that each of us can be a tiny filament in the vast, complex, dynamic web that will make up the resistance. Find your task and your team, and step into your place in the network, where your assignment is to connect, cooperate, and serve. For most of us, it’s not our job to come up with the best strategies. Indeed, if we’re privileged, it must not be our job. Now is the time to take direction from people most affected by the new regime (they’ve had it with your bright ideas), to be curious about each other’s lived experiences — and willing to align ourselves with people even if we share only a belief in our common humanity. “This is how we build the resistance and reconstitute our nation: by stitching together the social fabric one nuanced relationship at a time, our little threads waving at each other in the dark, blocking and building, sharing resources, warning each other of danger, and protecting those who need protecting.”
STONY BROOK, N.Y. (AP) — Joseph Octave scored 24 points as Stony Brook beat Maine 74-72 on Saturday. Octave also added five rebounds for the Seawolves (4-8). Ben Wight shot 4 of 7 from the field and 3 for 3 from the line to add 11 points. CJ Luster II shot 3 for 8 (2 for 5 from 3-point range) and 3 of 3 from the free-throw line to finish with 11 points. Kellen Tynes led the way for the Black Bears (8-6) with 15 points, four assists, four steals and two blocks. Jaden Clayton added 15 points, four assists and three steals for Maine. AJ Lopez finished with 13 points and four assists. Stony Brook went into halftime leading Maine 34-30. Octave put up 10 points in the half. Octave led Stony Brook with 14 points in the second half as his team was outscored by two points over the final half but held on for the victory. Both teams next play Sunday. Stony Brook visits Albany (NY) and Maine plays Boston University at home. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .Austin scores 20 off the bench, Portland downs Lafayette 74-64
