Новини

The United States announced late Monday the repatriation of a Tunisian man who had been held at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since 2002. 

Ridah Bin Saleh al-Yazidi was one of the first to be held at the facility, which at one point housed hundreds of detainees following the September 11, 2001, al-Qaida terror attacks on the United States. 

Yazidi was captured by Pakistani authorities in late 2001. He was among a group of about 30 fighters who had crossed the border from Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region, according to Pentagon files. 

The Pentagon assessment said most of the group was identified as al-Qaida operatives or bodyguards of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. 

Yazidi was never charged with a crime and cleared for transfer from Guantanamo in 2009, but there was no agreement in place for him to be sent to Tunisia or another country. 

The Pentagon said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress in January 2024 that officials had “completed the requirements for responsible transfer” in consultation with Tunisia. 

The repatriation leaves 26 detainees at Guantanamo, of whom 14 have been cleared for transfer.  

Some information for this story was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters 
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JARWENG, SOUTH SUDAN — Nobel Prize-winning peacemaker Jimmy Carter spent nearly four decades waging war to eliminate an ancient parasite plaguing the world’s poorest people.

Rarely fatal but searingly painful and debilitating, Guinea worm disease infects people who drink water tainted with larvae that grow inside the body into worms up to 3 feet long. The noodle-thin parasites then burrow their way out, breaking through the skin in burning blisters.

Carter made eradicating Guinea worm a top mission of The Carter Center, the nonprofit he and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, founded after leaving the White House. The former president rallied public health experts, billionaire donors, African heads of state and thousands of volunteer villagers to work toward eliminating a human disease for only the second time in history.

“It’d be the most exciting and gratifying accomplishment of my life,” Carter told The Associated Press in 2016. Even after entering home hospice care in February 2023, aides said Carter kept asking for Guinea worm updates.

Carter died Sunday at age 100.

Thanks to the Carters’ efforts, the worms that afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people in 20 African and Asian countries when the center launched its campaign in 1986 are on the brink of extinction. Only 14 human cases were reported across four African nations in 2023, according to The Carter Center.

The World Health Organization’s target for eradication is 2030. Carter Center leaders hope to achieve it sooner.

That meant recently returning to Jarweng, in a remote area of South Sudan in northeastern Africa. The village of 500 people hadn’t seen Guinea worm infections since 2014 until Nyingong Aguek and her two sons drank swampy water while traveling in 2022. A fourth person also got infected.

“Having the worm pulled out is more painful than giving birth,” said Aguek, pointing to scars where four worms emerged from her left leg.

The center’s staff and volunteers walked house to house distributing water filters and teaching people to inspect dogs, which can also carry the parasite.

“If someone’s hurt, The Carter Center will help,” said villager Mathew Manyiel, listening to a training session while checking his dog for symptoms.

An audacious plan

In the mid-1980s, global health agencies were otherwise occupied, and heads of state largely overlooked the illness afflicting millions of their citizens. Carter was still defining the center’s mission when public health experts who had served in his administration approached him with a plan to eliminate the disease.

Only a few years had passed since the WHO declared in 1979 that smallpox was the first human disease to be eradicated worldwide. Guinea worm, the experts told Carter, could become the second.

“President Carter, with a political background, was able to do far more in global health than we could do alone,” said Dr. William Foege, who led the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s smallpox eradication program and the CDC itself before becoming The Carter Center’s first executive director.

Those who worked closely with Carter suspect Guinea worm’s toll on poor African farmers resonated with the former president, who lived as a boy in a Georgia farmhouse without electricity or running water.

“Nobody was doing anything about it, and it was such a spectacularly awful disease,” said Dr. Donald Hopkins, an architect of the campaign who led the center’s health programs until 2015. “He could sympathize with all of these farmers being too crippled from Guinea worm disease to work.”

Changing behaviors

There’s no vaccine that prevents Guinea worm infections or medicine that gets rid of the parasites. Treatment has changed little since ancient Greece. Emerging worms are gently wound around a stick as they’re slowly pulled through the skin. Removing an entire worm without breaking it can take weeks.

So instead of scientific breakthroughs, this campaign has relied on persuading millions of people to change basic behaviors.

Workers from the center and host governments trained volunteers to teach neighbors to filter water through cloth screens, removing tiny fleas that carry the larvae. Villagers learned to watch for and report new cases — often for rewards of $100 or more. Infected people and dogs had to be prevented from tainting water sources.

The goal was to break the worm’s life cycle — and therefore eliminate the parasite itself — in each endemic community, eventually exterminating Guinea worm altogether.

The campaign became a model for confronting a broader range of neglected tropical diseases afflicting impoverished people with limited access to clean water, sanitation and health care. Expanding its public health mission, the center has supplied training, equipment and medicines that helped 22 countries eliminate at least one disease within their borders.

Mali became the latest in May 2023 when the WHO confirmed it had ended trachoma, a blinding eye infection. Haiti and the Dominican Republic are working to eliminate malaria and mosquito-borne lymphatic filariasis by 2030. Countries in Africa and the Americas are pursuing an end to river blindness by 2035.

A personal mission

Having a former U.S. president lead the charge brought big advantages to a nonprofit that relied on private donors to fund its initiatives.

Carter’s fundraising enabled the center to pour $500 million into fighting Guinea worm. He persuaded manufacturers to donate larvicide as well as nylon cloth and specially made drinking straws to filter water. His visits to afflicted villages often attracted news coverage, raising awareness globally.

“He went to so many of the localities where people were afflicted,” said Dr. William Brieger, a professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University who spent 25 years in Africa. “The kind of attention that was drawn to him for getting on the ground and highlighting the plight of individual people who were suffering, I think that made an important difference.”

Carter first saw the disease up close in 1988 while visiting a village in Ghana where nearly 350 people had worms poking through their skin. He approached a young woman who appeared to be cradling a baby in her arm.

“But there was no baby,” Carter wrote in his 2014 book “A Call to Action.” “Instead, she was holding her right breast, which was almost a foot long and had a worm emerging from the nipple.”

Carter used his status to sway other leaders to play larger roles. Some heads of state got competitive, spurred by the center’s charts and newsletters that showed which countries were making progress and which lagged behind.

Worms in a war zone

In 1995, Carter intervened when a civil war in southern Sudan made it too dangerous for workers to reach hundreds of hotspots. The ceasefire he negotiated enabled the center and others to distribute 200,000 water filters and discover more endemic villages.

Carter’s efforts not only stopped transmissions in much of what became South Sudan but also built trust across communities that resulted in a “significant peace dividend,” said Makoy Samuel Yibi, the young nation’s Guinea worm eradication director.

Pakistan in 1993 became the first endemic country to eliminate human cases. India soon followed. By 1997, the disease was no longer found in Asia. By 2003, cases reported worldwide were down to 32,000 — a 99% decline in less than two decades.

Some setbacks frustrated Carter. Visiting a hospital packed with suffering children and adults amid a 2007 resurgence in Ghana, Carter suggested publicly that the disease should perhaps be renamed “Ghana worm.”

“Ghana was deeply embarrassed,” Hopkins said.

Ghana ended transmission within three more years. Even more inspiring: Nigeria, which once had the most cases in the world, reached zero infections in 2009.

“That was a thunderclap,” Hopkins said. “It was important throughout Africa, throughout the global campaign.”

To the last worm

Even after being diagnosed with brain cancer, Carter remained focused: “I’d like the last Guinea worm to die before I do,” he told reporters in 2015.

Despite dwindling cases, total success has proven elusive.

Historic flooding and years of civil war have displaced millions of people who lack clean drinking water across central Africa. Of the 13 total cases reported in 2023, nine occurred in Chad, where infections in dogs have made the worms harder to eliminate.

“These are the most challenging places on planet Earth to operate in,” said Adam Weiss, who has directed the campaign since 2018. “You need eyes and ears on the ground every single day.”

The campaign still relies on about 30,000 volunteers spread among roughly 9,000 villages. Staying vigilant can be difficult now that cases are so rare, Weiss said.

“I would still like to think we will beat the timeline,” Weiss said of the 2030 eradication goal. “The Carter Center is committed to this, obviously, no matter what.”
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NEW YORK — Former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, will be sentenced on corruption charges as scheduled at the end of January, and his wife’s trial will be moved from January to February, a judge said Monday. 

U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in Manhattan rejected Menendez’s request to delay his sentencing for his conviction on bribery and other charges until his wife finishes her trial on similar charges, possibly sometime in March. 

The Democrat’s lawyers last week requested a new sentencing date on the grounds that the jury chosen to hear the case against his wife, Nadine Menendez, would be tainted if jurors heard about the outcome of the former senator’s sentencing during the trial. 

Menendez, 70, was convicted in July of 16 corruption charges brought by prosecutors who asserted that he used his power in the Senate over a five-year stretch through 2022 to do favors that benefitted three New Jersey businessmen who paid him with gold bars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and a Mercedes-Benz convertible. 

Two of the businessmen were convicted along with Menendez while a third pleaded guilty, cooperated with the government, and testified against him. 

Nadine Menendez has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Originally set to stand trial with her husband, her trial was put off after a breast cancer diagnosis led to surgery. Stein on Monday moved her January 21 trial to February 5. Her husband, as scheduled, will be sentenced on January 29. 
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У Курській області РФ Сили оборони від початку доби відбили 17 російських атак
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PLAINS, GEORGIA — In Jimmy Carter’s tiny hometown of Plains, Georgia on Monday, the former U.S. president’s death was only beginning to sink in, even if friends and neighbors have been bracing for it since he went into hospice care nearly two years ago. 

Those in the rural hamlet — a half block of buildings nestled in the shadow of massive agricultural silos — said the centenarian’s death was sad, but in the same breath they recounted fond memories of time spent with the former U.S. leader and global humanitarian. 

Carter’s commitment to Plains, where he was born 100 years ago and died Sunday at the modest home he had shared with his wife Rosalynn, is made clear by its residents — most knew him personally or have a family member who did. 

“It’ll always be Jimmy Carter’s hometown,” Kelly Kight, who was born and raised in Plains, population approximately 600, told AFP as she placed commemorative bows near her flower shop on the main strip. 

She said that more than an occasion for mourning, it was a day for remembrance of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and his humanitarian work in particular. 

Electric leaf blowers and tree trimmers provided a background chorus for the town, accustomed to gussying up quickly since it was first thrust into the national spotlight as Carter ran for president nearly 50 years ago and most recently when he began hospice care. 

“When he entered hospice, it kind of became a waiting game for all of the hometown people here in the community,” said Kight, whose family owned a peanut warehouse across from the Carter’s and whose father grew up alongside the Carter children. 

Carter, who had an unlikely political ascent from peanut farmer to the Oval Office, is almost omnipresent in Plains — his boyhood home, high school and the former train depot which served as his 1976 presidential campaign headquarters are now museums under the National Park Service.  

The town’s main drag is festooned with an enormous banner heralding Carter as the 39th president, while a goofy peanut statue with Carter’s trademark grin sits near his church, Maranatha Baptist. There, he welcomed visitors from around the world as he taught Sunday school into his 90s. 

‘A very fine gentleman’  

Carter’s death has long been anticipated — he was last seen in public looking very frail at his wife’s funeral in November 2023, after 77 years of marriage. 

His funeral schedule will include a stop at his boyhood farm, before his remains are taken onward to Atlanta and Washington, then returned to his hometown for interment. 

Kimberly Franklin, who also grew up in Plains, was leaving the Dollar General grocery store Monday, where she would sometimes encounter the Carters shopping like everyday people. 

“I am very sad,” the residential nurse, 56, told AFP, adding that Carter was just “an awesome guy.” 

Like most in Plains, she had a deeply personal memory of Carter, a profoundly religious Baptist who attended her baptism. 

Several blocks away, Plains resident Johnny Jones sat in a rocking chair on his porch, across from the high school Carter attended and in clear view of downtown. He was waiting for the bustle to begin. 

Jones watched as the town came to a standstill for Rosalynn Carter’s funeral and as swarms of journalists descended on Plains when Jimmy Carter announced his hospice care. Jones recounted with a twinkle in his eye that the media waited two weeks for Carter to die, then turned around and left. 

“I thought he was a very fine gentleman,” said Jones, an 85-year-old military retiree who liked Carter. “He did a lot for Plains.”
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WASHINGTON — Chinese hackers remotely accessed several U.S. Treasury Department workstations and unclassified documents after compromising a third-party software service provider, the agency said Monday. 

The department did not provide details on how many workstations had been accessed or what sort of documents the hackers may have obtained, but it said in a letter to lawmakers revealing the breach that “at this time there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury information.” 

“Treasury takes very seriously all threats against our systems, and the data it holds,” the department said. “Over the last four years, Treasury has significantly bolstered its cyber defense, and we will continue to work with both private and public sector partners to protect our financial system from threat actors.” 

The department said it learned of the problem on Dec. 8 when a third-party software service provider, BeyondTrust, flagged that hackers had stolen a key used by the vendor that helped it override the system and gain remote access to several employee workstations. 

The compromised service has since been taken offline, and there’s no evidence that the hackers still have access to department information, Aditi Hardikar, an assistant Treasury secretary, said in the letter Monday to leaders of the Senate Banking Committee. 

The department said it was working with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and that the hack had been attributed to Chinese culprits. It did not elaborate.
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Посадовців РФ заочно засудили до восьми років ув’язнення з конфіскацією майна за фінансування дій «з метою зміни меж території та кордону України»
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Taipei, Taiwan — The passing of former United States President Jimmy Carter was met with mixed reactions in China and Taiwan. Chinese President Xi Jinping praised him for helping to establish diplomatic ties between Beijing and Washington while some in Taiwan remain critical of his decision to sever official ties with the island to this day.

In a message to U.S. President Joe Biden, Xi expressed his “deep condolences” and described Carter as “the driving force behind the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States.” 

Former President Carter “made important contributions to the development of China-U.S. relations and the friendly exchanges and cooperation between the two countries,” China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV cited Xi as saying.

“China-U.S. ties are among the most import bilateral relationships in the world,” Xi said, adding that Beijing is willing to work with Washington to advance bilateral relations. 

During Carter’s time in office between 1977 and 1981, the U.S. established formal diplomatic relations with China, advancing the groundwork laid by former U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. 

In 1979, his administration recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the sole legal government of China and acknowledged Beijing’s position that Taiwan is a part of China. He also agreed to sever official ties with Taiwan, charting a new course in what would later become one of the world’s most complicated and consequential relationships. 

Much like Xi, many Chinese commentators and internet users praised Carter’s contribution to normalizing U.S.-China relations. 

Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of China’s state-run tabloid Global Times, said Carter helped to lay the foundation of the “friendly and cooperative relationship” between China and the U.S. by acknowledging China’s position on Taiwan.

While “his starting point is to safeguard the interests of the United States, during his term, China and the United States of America’s common interests have been highlighted and highlighted,” he wrote in a statement on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. 

Other Chinese internet users also characterized Carter as being more friendly to China than other U.S. leaders. “Of all the living former U.S. presidents, he is one of the friendlier to China,” Chinese netizen “Sheng Yuan Ran Dong” from Heilongjiang province wrote on Weibo.

“He was a good pacifist. He opened the floodgates of history by establishing diplomatic relations between China and the U.S. His good qualities are truly worth highlighting,” Chinese internet user “Abu from the magic forest” from Jiangxi Province wrote on Weibo.

Lu Chao, the director of Liaoning University’s Institute of American and East Asian Studies, said Carter not only facilitated the establishment of U.S.-China relations, he also maintained very good relations with then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. 

“Former President Carter made the right choice that was in line with the trend of global development, the fundamental interests of the United States, and the interests of China. It is still praised by Chinese and American people,” he told VOA. 

Mixed reactions in Taiwan 

While reactions from China to Carter’s passing were largely positive, perceptions about the former U.S. president’s complicated legacy in Taiwan were mixed. In a short post on social media platform X, Taiwan’s Presidential Office extended “sincere condolences” to Carter’s family and the American people.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s main opposition party Kuomintang (KMT), said on X that while Carter will be remembered in Taiwan “for his decision to derecognize the Republic of China” — Taiwan’s official name — they “admire his advocacy worldwide for affordable housing, conflict resolution, refugees, and other causes.”

In contrast to the moderate official response, some Taiwanese internet users criticized the former U.S. president for allowing China to become a major threat to Taiwan. 

While “the U.S. is now Taiwan’s strong ally, [Carter and Kissinger] are the ones who made China so difficult to deal with. From the two of them to the Obama era, Washington’s pro-China approach allowed China to build economic growth for decades and that’s the reason why the Chinese Communist Party can keep bullying Taiwan,” Taiwanese internet user Pbtato Hsieh wrote in a Facebook post. 

After the Carter administration severed ties with Taiwan in 1979, the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), later the same year, which allows Washington to maintain close unofficial ties with Taipei while requiring the U.S. to “provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” to “a sufficient self-defense capacity.”

The TRA also reaffirmed the United States commitment to preserving the human rights of the people of Taiwan. At the time the legislation was signed into law by then President Carter, Taiwan was under martial law and under the control of one single party, the KMT, which was led by Chiang Ching-kuo. Taiwan continued under martial law until 1989 and held its first direct presidential elections in 1996.

While Carter signed the TRA into law, some Taiwanese analysts say the former president shouldn’t be credited for providing the architecture that upholds the unofficial relations between Taiwan and the U.S. today. 

“It was because the government in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek and some grassroots Taiwanese American organizations maintained good relations with members of the U.S. Congress, so the Congress passed a piece of legislation that was more favorable toward Taiwan,” Chen Fang-yu, a political scientist at Soochow University in Taiwan, told VOA by phone. 

“The Taiwan Relations Act was not directly related to Carter,” he added. 

Despite his complicated legacy of handling Washington’s relations with Taiwan, other experts say Carter’s decision to sign the TRA into law still helped to build the “first blocks of today’s U.S.-Taiwan relationship.” 

“The de facto relationship that the U.S. and Taiwan have today began with him,” said Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University. 

“I don’t think he was the one who sat down and wrote the TRA, but he most certainly is the one who saw through the process of creating this new relationship with Taiwan after the recognition switch,” he told VOA by phone. 

VOA Mandarin’s Joyce Huang contributed to this report. 
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A state funeral will be held January 9 for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100. U.S. President Joe Biden scheduled the state funeral for Carter to be held the same day as National Day of Mourning.  Biden has also directed flags at public buildings to be displayed at half-staff for 30 days in honor of Carter.
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NEW YORK — Linda Lavin, a Tony Award-winning stage actress who became a working class icon as a paper-hat wearing waitress on the TV sitcom “Alice,” has died. She was 87. 

Lavin died in Los Angeles on Sunday of complications from recently discovered lung cancer, her representative, Bill Veloric, told The Associated Press in an email. 

A success on Broadway, Lavin tried her luck in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. She was chosen to star in a new CBS sitcom based on “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” the Martin Scorsese-directed film that won Ellen Burstyn an Oscar for playing the title waitress. 

The title was shortened to “Alice” and Lavin became a role model for working moms as Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother with a 12-year-old son working in a roadside diner outside Phoenix. The show, with Lavin singing the theme song “There’s a New Girl in Town,” ran from 1976 to 1985. 

The show turned “Kiss my grits” into a catchphrase and co-starred Polly Holliday as waitress Flo and Vic Tayback as the gruff owner and head chef of Mel’s Diner. 

The series bounced around the CBS schedule during its first two seasons but became a hit leading into “All in the Family” on Sunday nights in October 1977. It was among primetime’s top 10 series in four of the next five seasons. Variety magazine listed it among the all-time best workplace comedies. 

Lavin soon went on to win a Tony for best actress in a play for Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” in 1987. 

She was working as recently as this month promoting a new Netflix series in which she appears, “No Good Deed,” and filming a forthcoming Hulu series, “Mid-Century Modern,” according to Deadline, which first reported her death. 

Lavin grew up in Portland, Maine, and moved to New York City after graduating from the College of William and Mary. She sang in nightclubs and in ensembles of shows. 

Iconic producer and director Hal Prince gave Lavin her first big break while directing the Broadway musical “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman.” She went on to earn a Tony nomination in Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” in 1969 before winning 18 years later for another Simon play, “Broadway Bound.” 

In the mid 1970s, Lavin moved to Los Angeles. She had a recurring role on “Barney Miller” and in 1976 was chosen to star in a new CBS sitcom based on Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-winning waitress comedy-drama, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” 

Back on Broadway, Lavin later starred Paul Rudnick’s comedy “The New Century,” had a concert show called “Songs & Confessions of a One-Time Waitress” and earned a Tony nomination in Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories.” 

Michael Kuchwara of the AP gave Lavin a rave in “Collected Stories,” writing that she “gives one of those complete, nuanced performances, capturing the woman’s intellectual vigor, her wry sense of humor and her increasing physical frailty with astonishing fidelity. And Lavin’s sense of timing is superb, whether delivering a joke or acerbically dissecting the work of her protegee.” 

Lavin basked in a burst of renewed attention in her 70s, earning a Tony nomination for Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons.” She also starred in “Other Desert Cities” and a revival of “Follies” before they transferred to Broadway. 

The AP again raved about Lavin in “The Lyons,” calling her “an absolute wonder to behold as Rita Lyons, a nag of a mother with a collection of firm beliefs and eye rolls, a matriarch who is both suffocating and keeping everyone at arm’s length.” 

She also appeared in the film “Wanderlust” with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, and released her first CD, “Possibilities.” She played Jennifer Lopez’s grandmother in “The Back-Up Plan.” 

When asked for guidance from up-and-coming actresses, Lavin stressed one thing. “I say that what happened for me was that work brings work. As long as it wasn’t morally reprehensible to me, I did it,” she told the AP in 2011. 

She and Steve Bakunas, an artist, musician and her third husband, converted an old automotive garage into the 50-seat Red Barn Studio Theatre in Wilmington, North Carolina. 

It opened in 2007 and their productions include “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley, “Glengarry Glen Ross” by David Mamet, “Rabbit Hole” by David Lindsay-Abaire and “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” by Charles Busch, in which Lavin also starred on Broadway, earning a Tony nomination. 

She returned to TV in 2013 in “Sean Saves the World,” starring “Will & Grace’s” Sean Hayes, a show which lasted a season. Lavin also made appearances on “Mom” and “9JKL.” 
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Sports teams in former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia expressed their condolences Sunday, honoring a former leader who also served as the state’s governor and had an extensive record as an athlete and sports fan. 

The Atlanta Falcons football team held a moment of silence before their game Sunday night. 

The team’s owner, Arthur Blank, called Carter “a great American, a proud Georgian and an inspirational global humanitarian.” 

The Atlanta Hawks basketball team said Carter “represented all the best of Georgia.” 

“From his rural upbringing that he never strayed from, to his passion for Atlanta sports, Carter was proud of his home state and left a legacy for Georgians to be proud of, too,” the team said in a statement. 

Carter was most known for being a fan of the Atlanta Braves baseball team, whose games he and his wife, Rosalynn, attended for decades. 

The team celebrated his 100th birthday in October, and on Sunday it said Carter “served both his country and home state with honor his entire life.” 

“While the world knew him as a remarkable humanitarian and peacemaker, we knew him as a dedicated Braves fan and we will miss having him in the stands cheering on his Braves,” the team said in a statement. 

Carter was in attendance in 1974 when Braves player Hank Aaron set the Major League Baseball record for most career home runs. 

In 1995, Carter threw out the ceremonial first pitch before the sixth game of the World Series, which the Braves won to capture their first championship since moving to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1966. 

As an athlete himself, Carter was fond of playing softball, including during his time as president. 

While in the White House, Carter was also part of a boom in running in the United States that saw recreational running rapidly expand during the 1970s. 

His competitive running career included time on the U.S. Naval Academy cross-country team. 

Carter also enjoyed playing tennis and watching car racing, and he participated in the presidential tradition of welcoming championship sports teams to the White House. 

Some information for this story was provided by The Associated Press
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Закон передбачає, що з 1 січня 2025 року замість МСЕК запрацюють експертні комісії
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Слідство також перевіряє причетність заступника командира до розкрадання в бригаді харчів та іншого майна
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Для промисловості та бізнесу графіки обмеження потужності діятимуть з 8 по 19 годину
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Також, за даними КМІС, за останній рік стало менше тих, хто вважає, що українці потроху долають суперечності та рухаються до згуртованої політичної нації
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Officials assessed the damage on Sunday after a strong storm system moved across the southern United States over the weekend, spawning tornadoes and killing at least four people. 

There were at least 45 reports of tornado damage across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. Crews will do damage surveys to confirm tornadoes. 

The storms during busy holiday travels caused some treacherous road conditions along with delays or cancellations at some of the busiest U.S. airports. As of Sunday afternoon, there were over 600 flight delays affecting Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in the southern state of Georgia, according to flight tracker FlightAware. 

“It’s not unheard of, but it is fairly uncommon to have a severe weather outbreak of this magnitude this late in the year,” said Frank Pereira, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. 

In the area of Houston, Texas, National Weather Service storm survey crews confirmed that at least five tornadoes hit north and south of the city on Saturday. 

At least one person died. The 48-year-old woman was found about 30 meters from her home in the Liverpool area south of Houston, said Madison Polston of the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office. She said the exact cause of death wasn’t immediately known. 

Four other people in Brazoria County had injuries that weren’t considered critical, said Polston, adding that at least 40 homes and buildings were significantly damaged. 

In Montgomery County, north of Houston, about 30 homes were destroyed and about 50 others sustained major damage, county official Jason Smith said. 

In the state of North Carolina, a 70-year-old man was killed Sunday in Statesville, just north of Charlotte, when a tree landed on the pickup truck he was driving. Highway Patrol Trooper DJ Maffucci said “it was just a freak accident” and he believed Matthew Teeple, of Cleveland, North Carolina, was killed instantly. 

“It’s very sad, just terrible timing,” Maffucci said, adding that the storms were responsible for a number of downed trees and “quite a few wrecks.” 

Two people were killed in storms in Mississippi, officials said. An 18-year-old died after a tree fell on her home Saturday night in Natchez in Adams County, said Emergency Management spokesperson Neifa Hardy. Two other people in the home were injured. 

Another person died in Lowndes County and at least eight more were injured across the state, officials said. 

The National Weather Service said two tornadoes hit around Bude and the city of Brandon, ripping roofs from several buildings. 

Storm damage also was reported in the northern Alabama city of Athens, northwest of Huntsville. 

Holly Hollman, spokeswoman for the city, said most of the damage from the early Sunday morning storms occurred downtown. She said it hurled large HVAC units from the tops of building and ripped the roof off a bookstore. A full-sized, stripped-down military helicopter was toppled from a pole where it was on display, she added. 

“I stepped out on my porch and I could hear it roar,” she said of the storm. “I think we are extremely lucky that we got hit late at night. If it had hit during the busy hours, I think we might have had some injuries and possibly some fatalities.” 

As of Sunday afternoon, more than 40,000 people were still without power in Mississippi, according to electric utility tracking website PowerOutage.us. Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia each had about 10,000 customers without power, it said. 

The storms closed some roads in western North Carolina, a region broadly devastated by Hurricane Helene this fall. That included part of U.S. 441, also known as the Great Smoky Mountains Expressway, which closed north of Bryson City due to high winds. 

In Bumpus Cove, Tennessee, Justin Fromkin, president of Raising Hope Disaster Relief, worked Sunday to save what he could from the organization’s supply tent — filled with clothes and food — after about 152 millimeters of rain fell. 

He’s spent the past few months delivering aid to areas in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee that are still reeling from Helene. The ground in some parts of the mountains is still unstable from Helene, Fromkin said, and Sunday’s downpour adds to the problem. 
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