Proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons is halted by federal, state judges The proposed $24.6 billion merger between supermarket giants Kroger and Albertsons floundered on Tuesday after judges overseeing two separate cases both halted the merger. A federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the proposed merger until an in-house administrative judge at the Federal Trade Commission considers it. Shortly afterward, a judge in Washington state issued a permanent injunction barring the merger in that state, saying it lessens competition. Kroger and Albertsons in 2022 proposed what would be the largest grocery store merger in U.S. history. But the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Washington sued earlier this year. Biden says he was 'stupid' not to put his name on pandemic relief checks like Trump did WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden says he was “stupid” not to put his own name on pandemic relief checks in 2021, like Donald Trump had done in 2020. He noted Tuesday in a speech at the Brookings Institution that Trump likely got credit for helping people out through this simple, effective act of branding. Biden did the second-guessing as he defended his economic record and challenged Trump to preserve Democratic policy ideas when he returns to the White House next month. Trump’s decision to add his name to the checks sent by the U.S. Treasury to millions of Americans struggling during the coronavirus marked the first time a president’s name appeared on any IRS payments. Former chairman of state-owned bank China Everbright Group jailed for 12 years for corruption BEIJING (AP) — Chinese official broadcaster CCTV says a former chairman of the state-owned bank China Everbright Group has been jailed 12 years for embezzlement and bribery. Tang Shuangning, who had also held senior posts at the People’s Bank of China and the China Banking Regulatory Commission, was arrested in January, part of a wider wave of prosecutions of senior officials accused of financial crimes. A court in the city of Tangshan, about 100 miles east of Beijing, found him guilty of taking advantage of his position at the state-owned bank in “seeking convenience for others” in jobs and loans, in exchange for illegal payments. The court said he had accepted illegal property with a total value of more than $1.5 million. US defense secretary in Japan to support alliance as Osprey aircraft safety causes concern TOKYO (AP) — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has met with officials in Japan to reaffirm the importance of their alliance and Washington's commitment to regional security as threats rise from China and North Korea. Austin’s visit on Tuesday also came amid growing concerns over the safety of Ospreys. The military aircraft have been grounded in the United States following a near crash at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico last month. The incident was caused by weakened metal components. It was similar to a fatal crash off southwestern Japan last year. The U.S. measure prompted the suspension of Ospreys operated by Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force. Trustee over Infowars auction asks court to approve The Onion's winning bid A trustee who oversaw the bankruptcy auction of Alex Jones’ Infowars is asking a judge to approve The Onion’s winning bid for the conspiracy-filled platform. Trustee Christopher Murray took the stand Tuesday in the second day of testimony at a hearing where a judge is scrutinizing the satirical news outlet’s winning offer. He told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston that he was there asking a court to approve the sale of Infowars’ parent company to The Onion’s parent company. It is not clear how quickly Lopez will rule. The Onion wants to turn Infowars’ website and social media accounts into parodies. Small businesses plan events, start marketing earlier to deal with shorter holiday shopping season The holiday shopping season is underway, and this year small businesses have less time to capitalize on the busy shopping period. Only 27 days separate Thanksgiving and Christmas — five fewer than last year. But there are still ways to make the most of a shorter season. One key strategy is for owners to promote deals to customers wherever they can, from social media to physical ads. The National Retail Federation predicts that retail sales will rise between 2.5% and 3.5% compared with same period a year ago. Online shopping is expected to grow too. Adobe Digital Insights predicts an 8.4% increase online for the full season. 10 notable books of 2024, from Sarah J. Maas to Melania Trump NEW YORK (AP) — Even through a year of nonstop news about elections, climate change, protests and the price of eggs, Americans still found time to read. Sales held steady according to Circana, which tracks around 85% of the print market. Many chose the release of romance, fantasy and romantasy. Some picked up the tie-in book to Taylor Swift’s blockbuster tour, which had the best opening week of 2024. Others sought out literary fiction, celebrity memoirs, political exposes and a close and painful look at a generation hooked on smartphones. Boeing is building new 737 Max planes for the first time since workers went on strike Boeing is resuming production of its bestselling plane, the 737 Max. It's the first time that Max jets have moved down the assembly line since September, when about 33,000 workers went on strike for higher pay. Boeing said Tuesday that work on the Max has resumed at its factory in Renton, Washington, near Seattle. Both the Max and another Boeing plane, the 787 Dreamliner, have been plagued by manufacturing problems in recent years. The Federal Aviation Administration is limiting Boeing’s production of Max jets until the agency is convinced that Boeing has corrected quality and safety issues during manufacturing. Stock market today: Wall Street slips to a rare back-to-back loss NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stock indexes drifted lower in the runup to the highlight of the week for the market, the latest update on inflation. The S&P 500 slipped 0.3% Tuesday for its first back-to-back losses in nearly a month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.3%, and the Nasdaq composite also fell 0.3%. Oracle dragged on the market after reporting weaker growth than analysts expected. Treasury yields rose in the bond market ahead of Wednesday’s inflation report, which will be among the final big pieces of data before the Federal Reserve's meeting on interest rates next week. GM to retreat from robotaxis and stop funding its Cruise autonomous vehicle unit DETROIT (AP) — General Motors says it will retreat from the robotaxi business and stop funding its money-losing Cruise autonomous vehicle unit. Instead the Detroit automaker will focus on development of partially automated driver-assist systems like its Super Cruise, which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel. In a statement Tuesday, GM said it would get out of robotaxis due to what it described as the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.76ers' star Paul George sidelined the next 2 games with bone bruise in left knee
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Tescha Hawley (right) and her mother, Janice Hawley, serve food from Tescha’s nonprofit to cross-country teams at the Harlem Invitational in Harlem, Montana. Tescha began the Day Eagle Hope Project to improve the health of her community after seeing how hard it was to access care when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. (Jessica Plance/KFF Health News/TNS) Tescha Hawley, a citizen of the Gros Ventre Tribe who lives on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, is among the patients who say they were stuck with medical debt that the Indian Health Service should have paid. (Jessica Plance/KFF Health News/TNS) Tescha Hawley (center) sits for a portrait with her children, Tearia Sunchild (left) and Trayce Sunchild, near Jim Brown Creek on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana. Tescha says hospital bills from her son’s birth that the Indian Health Service promised to pay were sent to debt collectors in her name. The financial consequences lasted years. (Jessica Plance/KFF Health News/TNS) Tescha Hawley (right) and her mother, Janice Hawley, serve food from Tescha’s nonprofit to cross-country teams at the Harlem Invitational in Harlem, Montana. Tescha began the Day Eagle Hope Project to improve the health of her community after seeing how hard it was to access care when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. (Jessica Plance/KFF Health News/TNS) Tescha Hawley (right) and her mother, Janice Hawley, serve food from Tescha’s nonprofit to cross-country teams at the Harlem Invitational in Harlem, Montana. Tescha began the Day Eagle Hope Project to improve the health of her community after seeing how hard it was to access care when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. (Jessica Plance/KFF Health News/TNS) By Katheryn Houghton and Arielle Zionts, KFF Health News (TNS) Tescha Hawley learned that hospital bills from her son’s birth had been sent to debt collectors only when she checked her credit score while attending a home-buying class. The new mom’s plans to buy a house stalled. Hawley said she didn’t owe those thousands of dollars in debts. The federal government did. Hawley, a citizen of the Gros Ventre Tribe, lives on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana. The Indian Health Service is a federal agency that provides free health care to Native Americans, but its services are limited by a chronic shortage of funding and staff. Hawley’s local Indian Health Service hospital wasn’t equipped to deliver babies. But she said staff there agreed that the agency would pay for her care at a privately owned hospital more than an hour away. That arrangement came through the Purchased/Referred Care program, which pays for services Native Americans can’t get through an agency-funded clinic or hospital. Federal law stresses that patients approved for the program aren’t responsible for any of the costs. But tribal leaders, health officials, and a new federal report say patients are routinely billed anyway as a result of backlogs or mistakes from the Indian Health Service, financial middlemen, hospitals, and clinics. The financial consequences for patients can last years. Those sent to collections can face damaged credit scores, which can prevent them from securing loans or require them to pay higher interest rates. The December report , by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, found these long-standing problems contribute to people in Native American-majority communities being nearly twice as likely to have medical debt in collections compared with the national average. And their amount of medical debt is significantly higher. The report found the program is often late to pay bills. In some cases, hospitals or collection agencies hound tribal citizens for more money after bills are paid. Hawley’s son was born in 2003. She had to wait another year to buy a home, as she struggled to pay off the debt. It took seven years for it to drop from her credit report. “I don’t think a person ever recovers from debt,” Hawley said. Hawley, a cancer survivor, still must navigate the referral program. In 2024 alone, she received two notices from clinics about overdue bills. Frank White Clay, chairman of the Crow Tribe in Montana, testified about the impact of wrongful billing during a U.S. House committee hearing in April. He shared stories of veterans rejected for home loans, elders whose Social Security benefits were reduced, and students denied college loans and federal aid. “Some of the most vulnerable people are being harassed daily by debt collectors,” White Clay said. No one is immune from the risk. A high-ranking Indian Health Service official learned during her job’s background check that her credit report contained referred-care debt, the federal report found. Native Americans face disproportionately high rates of poverty and disease , which researchers link to limited access to health care and the ongoing impact of racist federal policies . White Clay is among many who say problems with the referred-care program are an example of the U.S. government violating treaties that promised to provide for the health and welfare of tribes in return for their land. The chairman’s testimony came during a hearing on the Purchased and Referred Care Improvement Act, which would require the Indian Health Service to create a reimbursement process for patients who were wrongfully billed. Committee members approved the bill in November and sent it for consideration by the full House. A second federal bill, the Protecting Native Americans’ Credit Act , would prevent debt like Hawley’s from affecting patients’ credit scores. The bipartisan bill hadn’t had a hearing by mid-December. The exact number of people wrongfully billed isn’t clear, but the Indian Health Service has acknowledged it has work to do. The agency is developing a dashboard to help workers track referrals and to speed up bill processing, spokesperson Brendan White said. It’s also trying to hire more referred-care staff, to address vacancy rates of more than 30%. Officials say problems with the program also stem from outside health providers that don’t follow the rules. Melanie Egorin, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said at the hearing that the proposed legislation doesn’t include consequences for “bad actors” — health facilities that repeatedly bill patients when they shouldn’t. “The lack of enforcement is definitely a challenge,” she said. But tribal leaders warned that penalties could backfire. Related Articles Health | How America lost control of the bird flu, setting the stage for another pandemic Health | How to kick back, relax and embrace a less-than-perfect holiday Health | New childhood leukemia protocol is ‘tremendous win’ Health | For some FSA dollars, it’s use it or lose it at year’s end Health | Norovirus is rampant. Blame oysters, cruise ships and holiday travel White Clay told lawmakers that some clinics already refuse to see patients if the Indian Health Service hasn’t paid for their previous appointments. He’s worried the threat of penalties would lead to more refusals. If that happens, White Clay said, Crow tribal members who already travel hours to access specialty treatment would have to go even farther. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report found clinics are already refusing to see any referred-care patients due to the program’s payment problems. The bureau and the Indian Health Service also recently published a letter urging health care providers and debt collectors not to hold patients accountable for program-approved care. White, the Indian Health Service spokesperson, said the agency recently updated the referred-care forms sent to outside hospitals and clinics to include billing instructions and to stress that patients aren’t liable for any out-of-pocket costs. And he said the staff can help patients get reimbursed if they have already paid for services that were supposed to be covered. Joe Bryant, an Indian Health Service official who oversees efforts to improve the referral program, said patients can ask credit bureaus to remove debt from their reports if the agency should have covered their bills. Leaders with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington state helped shape the proposed legislation after their citizens were repeatedly harmed by wrongful billing. Tribal Chairman Jarred-Michael Erickson said problems began in 2017, when a regional Indian Health Service office took over the referred-care program from local staff. It “created a domino effect of negative outcomes,” Erickson wrote in a letter to Congress. He said some tribal members whose finances were damaged stopped using the Indian Health Service. Others avoided health care altogether. Responsibility for the Colville Reservation program transferred back to local staff in 2022. Staffers found the billing process hadn’t been completed for thousands of cases, worth an estimated $24 million in medical care, Erickson told lawmakers . Workers are making progress on the backlog and they have explained the rules to outside hospitals and clinics, Erickson said. But he said there are still cases of wrongful billing, such as a tribal member who was sent to collections after receiving a $17,000 bill for chemotherapy that the agency was supposed to pay for. Erickson said the tribe is in the process of taking over its health care facilities instead of having the Indian Health Service run them. He and others who work in Native American health said tribally managed units — which are still funded by the federal agency — tend to have fewer problems with their referred-care programs. For example, they have more oversight over staff and flexibility to create their own payment tracking systems. But some Native Americans oppose tribal management because they feel it releases the federal government from its obligations. Beyond wrongful billing, access to the referred-care program is limited because of underfunding from Congress. The $1 billion budget this year is $9 billion short of the need, according to a committee report by tribal health and government leaders. Donald Warne, a physician and member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, called the proposed legislation a “band-aid.” He said the ultimate solution is for Congress to fully fund the Indian Health Service, which would reduce the need for the referred-care program. Back in Montana, Hawley said she braces for a fight each time she gets a bill that the referral program was supposed to cover. “I’ve learned not to trust the process,” Hawley said. ©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Comino’s High-Performance Server: A Game-Changer for AI and HPC Workloads In an exciting advancement for tech enthusiasts, Comino has rolled out its latest innovation, the Grando H100 Server. Designed to cater to demanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) needs, this powerhouse integrates cutting-edge technology to deliver exceptional results. At the heart of the Grando H100 is AMD’s Threadripper PRO 7995WX processor, equipped with a staggering 96 cores and 192 threads. Utilizing AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, it supports a remarkable 2TB of DDR5 memory, making it ideal for handling extensive data processing tasks with ease. Enhancing its capabilities further, the server is outfitted with two Nvidia H100 NVL GPUs, together offering an impressive 188GB of GPU memory. The backbone of this system is its ASUS SAGE WRX90 motherboard, which supplies plentiful PCIe Gen5 lanes, ensuring seamless connections for GPUs and high-speed storage. Comino, famed for its expertise in liquid-cooled systems, has incorporated an advanced cooling solution within the Grando H100. This setup promises stable performance under heavy loads while operating quietly. In recent benchmarks, the Grando H100 showcased excellent performance in AI-specific computations, rendering, and compression tasks. However, in certain traditional rendering scenarios, it did not outperform systems optimized with alternative GPUs. Summing up these features, the Grando H100 Server stands out as an essential tool for enterprises and professionals concentrating on AI-centric workloads. With its robust build and innovative cooling, it provides both flexibility and reliability in demanding environments, leaving tech enthusiasts eager for what’s next. The Future of AI and HPC: Why Comino’s Grando H100 Server is the Ultimate Powerhouse Introduction Comino’s latest offering, the Grando H100 Server, redefines the standards for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. This robust server is packed with cutting-edge technology and promises to be a game-changer for tech enthusiasts and enterprises focusing on AI-driven initiatives. Features and Specifications – Unparalleled Processing Power : At the core of the Grando H100 is AMD’s Threadripper PRO 7995WX processor, boasting 96 cores and 192 threads. This processor utilizes AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, making it a potent force for AI and data processing tasks. – Massive Memory Capacity : With support for up to 2TB of DDR5 memory, the Grando H100 can handle vast datasets with ease. This feature is particularly beneficial for AI applications that require extensive memory for efficient processing. – Advanced GPU Integration : The server includes dual Nvidia H100 NVL GPUs, which contribute a total of 188GB of GPU memory. This configuration enhances AI-specific computations, rendering, and compression tasks. – Innovative Cooling System : Comino’s reputation for liquid cooling excellence is demonstrated in the Grando H100. The advanced cooling technology ensures stable and quiet operation, even under the heaviest workloads. Use Cases The Grando H100 is tailored for enterprises focused on AI-centric workloads. It is ideal for: – AI Model Training and Inference : The server’s expansive GPU memory and processing power enable rapid AI model training and accurate inference, making it suitable for research and development environments. – Data-Intensive Simulations : Industries such as finance and healthcare, which rely on complex simulations and real-time data analysis, will find the Grando H100’s capabilities indispensable. – Rendering and Media Workflows : While the server excels in AI-specific rendering tasks, it may not match some specialized systems for traditional rendering. However, it remains a formidable choice for media professionals requiring high performance. Pros and Cons – Pros : Exceptional computing power, advanced cooling, expansive memory and GPU capabilities. – Cons : May not outperform alternative GPU-optimized systems in specific traditional rendering scenarios. Market Analysis and Trends With the surge of AI applications and the growing demand for high-performance computing, the market for servers like the Grando H100 is expanding. Enterprises are increasingly seeking reliable and powerful solutions to manage massive datasets efficiently. Comino’s Grando H100 sets a precedent in this evolving market, aligning with the trend towards more specialized hardware for AI and HPC environments. Conclusion The Comino Grando H100 Server stands out as a necessary asset for businesses leveraging AI technologies. Its robust build, coupled with industry-leading components, positions it as a leader in the realm of high-performance computing. This server promises to pave the way for future innovations, meeting the market’s demand for a balance of power, efficiency, and reliability. For more information about their latest innovations, visit Comino .In a lengthy speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C. think tank, on Tuesday, President Joe Biden forcefully defended his economic legacy and harshly criticized his successor. “Most economists agree the new administration is going to inherit a fairly strong economy, at least at the moment, an economy going through fundamental transformation,” Biden said. “It is my profound hope that the new administration will preserve and build on this progress. Like most great economic developments, this one is neither red nor blue, and America's progress is everyone's progress.” RELATED STORY | What impacts will a Trump presidency have on the economy? The president pointed specifically to record job growth during his tenure and an historically-low unemployment rate, as well as solid GDP performance, major investments in infrastructure and a soaring stock market. Most economists agree Biden’s term in office has coincided with a strong jobs market, and note the economic forecast remains bright – especially when contrasted to that of other peer nations, many of which have struggled to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, Americans by and large disapprove of Biden’s economic tenure, particularly the high costs of goods and services. Though inflation has fallen some, it remains higher than when the president took office and has become a frequent point of attack for Republicans critical of the Biden administration. RELATED STORY | Wealthier Americans are driving retail spending and powering US economy President-elect Donald Trump’s victory last month served in some was as a repudiation of the president’s so-called “Bidenomics” policies, with most voters telling pollsters they were dissatisfied with the state of the U.S. economy and Biden’s handling of the issue. Since Trump’s election, attitudes towards the economy have improved slightly, particularly among Republicans; according to research from Gallup, just eight percent of Republicans in October viewed economic conditions as getting better, compared to 30% last month. Biden himself seemed to acknowledge some missteps in selling his economic vision to Americans. “I also learned something from Donald Trump,” Biden said. “He signed checks for people for $7,400 bucks,” the president noted of the pandemic-era relief measures. Even though Biden approved similar relief efforts during his term, his name never appeared on American’s checks. “I didn't – stupid,” Biden conceded. RELATED STORY | Powell says Fed will likely cut rates cautiously given persistent inflation pressures Seeking to bolster Biden’s economic legacy, the White House on Tuesday launched a new website hailing the “Biden Economy,” featuring statistics about economic performance during his term and complimentary videos from his supporters. Biden’s speach, meanwhile, also served as a warning of sorts to his successor, with the president arguing against tax cuts for the wealthy and the notion that such benefits would “trickle down” to middle class Americans. “You can make as much money as you can, good for you, but everybody's got to be they pay their fair share,” Biden said. Trump has pledged to extend the tax cuts he signed into law in 2017, telling NBC News he intends to submit a tax package to Congress within his first 100 days in office. “They’re coming due and they’re very substantial for people,” Trump said of his 2017 cuts. “That’s what led us to one of the greatest economies ever.” RELATED STORY | Amid corporate layoffs, 36% of workforce turns to gig economy for alternative employment A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in December found that failing to extend those tax incentives would have a negligible impact on the economy, though Republicans are expected to pursue them and other business tax breaks after they retake both chambers of Congress next year. Trump has also promised to impose significant tariffs on the import of foreign goods from Mexico, Canada and China – despite economists’ and retailers’ warnings that will drive up consumer prices. Trump in the NBC interview said he couldn’t guarantee the move wouldn’t increase consumer costs, something Biden harshly refuted. “I believe we've proven that approach is a mistake over the past four years,” Biden said. “But we all know in time, we all know in time what will happen.”
NEW YORK, Dec. 10, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Priority Income Fund, Inc. ("Priority Income Fund” or the "Fund”) announced today that the Fund's Board of Directors has declared monthly cash "base” and "bonus” common shareholder distributions for December 2024, January 2025 and February 2025. The annualized total cash distribution is $1.34016 per share (12.0% annualized rate for Class R and 12.9% annualized rate for Class I), for distributions with record dates between December 10, 2024 and February 5, 2025 based on the current Class R offering price of $11.16 per common share and the current Class I offering price of $10.41 per common share. The cash "base” distribution will have monthly record dates and will be payable monthly to common stockholders of record at the close of business each month. These declared distributions equal a weekly cash amount of $0.02014 per share of common stock (or $0.26182 on a quarterly basis) as follows: "Base” Shareholder Distribution ($ per share) These distributions represent the 132 nd , 133 rd and 134 th consecutive monthly "base” distributions paid by the Fund. The Fund's Board of Directors has also declared new monthly cash "bonus” distributions, as follows: "Bonus” Shareholder Distribution ($ per share) The September, October and November cash "bonus” distributions represents the 51 s t , 52 n d , and 53 rd "bonus” distributions that the Fund has declared, which are now paid monthly starting January 2024. The Fund has paid or declared cumulative cash distributions totaling $15.72 per common share since inception in January 2014 through February 2025. The Fund also announced today the declaration of distributions on shares of the Fund's 7.00% Series D Term Preferred Stock due 2029 ("Series D”), 6.625% Series F Term Preferred Stock due 2027 ("Series F”), 6.000% Series H Term Preferred Stock due 2026 ("Series H”), 6.125% Series I Term Preferred Stock due 2028 ("Series I”), 6.000% Series J Term Preferred Stock due 2028 ("Series J”), 7.000% Series K Cumulative Preferred Stock ("Series K”), and 6.375% Series L Term Preferred Stock due 2029 ("Series L”). Share Distributions shall first be treated as a distribution of taxable investment company income undistributed from the prior year, and then treated as a distribution of taxable investment company income for the current year. This treatment will not affect tax reporting to shareholders. About Priority Income Fund Priority Income Fund, Inc. is a registered closed-end fund that was created to acquire and grow an investment portfolio primarily consisting of senior secured loans or pools of senior secured loans known as collateralized loan obligations ("CLOs"). Such loans will generally have a floating interest rate and include a first lien on the assets of the respective borrowers, which typically are private and public companies based in the United States. The Fund is managed by Priority Senior Secured Income Management, LLC, which is led by a team of investment professionals from the investment and operations team of Prospect Capital Management L.P. For more information, visit https://www.priorityincomefund.com . About Prospect Capital Management L.P. Prospect Capital Management L.P. ("Prospect”), headquartered in New York City, is an SEC-registered investment adviser that, along with its predecessors and affiliates, has more than 30-years of investing in and managing high-yielding debt and equity investments using both private partnerships and publicly traded closed-end structures. Prospect and its affiliates employ a team of over 100 professionals who focus on credit-oriented investments yielding attractive current income. Prospect, together with its affiliates, has $8.7 billion of assets under management as of September 30, 2024. For more information, call (212) 448-0702 or visit https://www.prospectcap.com . About Preferred Capital Securities, LLC Preferred Capital Securities, LLC ("PCS”) serves as the dealer-manager for Priority Income Fund, Inc. and has been a member of FINRA/SIPC since 2015. Formed in 2013, PCS is a boutique managing broker-dealer that distributes alternative investments, including real estate and credit investment products in private and public structures through broker dealers and registered investment advisors. PCS has raised over $4.8 billion of capital as a wholesale distributor for various alternative investment strategies. For more information, call 855-320-1414 or visit http://www.pcsalts.com . [email protected] (855) 330-6594 [email protected] (855) 422-3223 Additional Information Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Our distributions may exceed our earnings, and therefore, portions of the distributions that we make may be a return of the money that you originally invested and represent a return of capital to you for tax purposes. Such a return of capital is not immediately taxable, but reduces your tax basis in our shares, which may result in higher taxes for you even if your shares are sold at a price below your original investment. Investors should consider the investment objective and policies, risk considerations, charges and ongoing expenses of an investment carefully before investing. The prospectus and summary prospectus contains this and other information relevant to an investment in the fund. Please read the prospectus or summary prospectus carefully before you invest or send money. To obtain a prospectus, please contact your investment representative or Investor Services at 866.655.3650. Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the future performance of Priority Income Fund, Inc. Words such as "believes," "expects," "projects," and "future" or similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Any such statements, other than statements of historical fact, are highly likely to be affected by unknowable future events and conditions, including elements of the future that are or are not under the control of Priority Income Fund, Inc. and that Priority Income Fund, Inc. may or may not have considered; accordingly, such statements cannot be guarantees or assurances of any aspect of future performance. Actual developments and results are highly likely to vary materially from any forward-looking statements. Such statements speak only as of the time when made, and Priority Income Fund, Inc. undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise .I Love Taylor Swift, But Is It Ruining My Life? How Being A Swiftie Validates My Existence, But Also Makes Me Question My View On Celebrities
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After multiple cases where roads in Lutyens Delhi caved in due to damage to the British-era sewer lines running underneath, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has proposed an ambitious ₹ 556 crore project to restore the drainage system, officials aware of the matter said. Traffic movement is likely to be affected in New Delhi when the work begins. NDMC officials said that the work will only be taken up on coordination with traffic police to minimise snarls, and trenchless technology will be used to reduce the impact on vehicular movement. NDMC maintains around 350km of sewer lines, which is spread over an area of 42.7 sq km of the New Delhi area — much of which was built between 1920 and 1930. Though only around 250,000 people live here, around 1.75 million people travel to this part of the Capital every day for work. “The council has prepared a comprehensive plan to replace and upgrade the pre-Independence infrastructure, and over the next few years, the rehabilitation work will be taken up at large scale so that the underlying infrastructure in New Delhi can meet the increased demand,” NDMC vice chairperson Kuljeet Chahal said. Officials said that NDMC plans to fund the project — likely to last five years — by using the urban development fund of the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA), and that work is likely to start in 2025. “The matter has been taken up with the ministry, and under the project, 17 lines will be covered. The proposal was presented to the project sanctioning committee on July 19. The proposal for hydraulic analysis and the detailed plan have already been processed, and the project is likely to be started in the next financial year,” the official said. NDMC officials said that over the decades, corrosive gases from these sewage lines have damaged the outer layers of the sewer pipes. “This leads to collapse or settlement every year during the monsoon season,” an NDMC official aware of the proposal said. “The sewage lines are varying sizes ranging from a diameter of 350mm to 2,100mm, but most of the lines are more than 70 years old. These old lines need augmentation and replacement,” the official said. Officials said the repair works are at varying stages of planning and execution. “The work on the brick barrel line from Kushak Nallah to Aurobindo Marg at Brigadier Hoshiyar Singh Marg has been awarded and it is likely to start by March. Similarly, the pre-consultancy work for desilting and rehabilitation of twin barrel line from C-Hexagon to Lodhi Road through Zakir Hussian Marg-Golf Course-Subramanium Bharti Marg has been completed and the work is likely to start in next financial year,” the official said. “Similarly, tenders have been invited for the rehabilitation of the sewer from Telegraph Lane to Kasturba Gandhi Marg via Madhavrao Scindia Marg,” the official said. Gopal Krishna, who heads the New Delhi RWA federation, and has been a resident of the area since 1974, said that a lack of timely repairs and upgradation of the infrastructure has led to the deterioration of services. “Most of the infrastructure in New Delhi was built before Independence, but it has not been upgraded in a timely phased manner. The civic agencies wake up only after a section is damaged. Instead of treating isolated sites, a comprehensive plan is needed for increasing the capacity of the basic infrastructure as the population has gone up several times,” he said.Southern California defense contractors optimistic Trump administration could create jobs locally
Summit Therapeutics (NASDAQ:SMMT) Trading Down 6.2% – Here’s What HappenedWhat a merger between Nissan and Honda means for the automakers and the industryGeorgia quarterback Carson Beck on Saturday announced his plans to enter the NFL draft, five days after having season-ending elbow surgery . Beck, a fifth-year senior, made his NFL plans official on social media. Beck suffered a right elbow injury in the first half of the Bulldogs’ 22-19 overtime win over Texas in the Southeastern Conference championship game on Dec. 7 in Atlanta. Beck had surgery on Monday to repair his ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow. The procedure was performed by Dr. Neal ElAttrache in Los Angeles. Beck is expected to begin throwing next spring. He could have returned for a sixth season but instead will enter the NFL draft. Beck posted on Instagram: “The past five years at the University of Georgia have been nothing short of a dream come true and I will forever cherish the memories that have been made.” Gunner Stockton, who took over for Beck in the second half against Texas, will start for Georgia on Wednesday in the Sugar Bowl against Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff quarterfinals. Beck has started every game of the 2023 and 2024 seasons. He was 24-3 as a starter. Beck passed for 3,941 yards with 24 touchdowns and only six interceptions in 2023 but had more difficulties with turnovers this season as he passed for 28 touchdowns with 12 interceptions. He completed 7 of 13 passes for 56 yards before his injury in the SEC championship game. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football
Jimmy Carter , who followed a principled yet tumultuous single term in the White House with a post-presidency dedicated to human rights and peace advocacy, has died. At 100, Carter — who was born on Oct. 1, 1924 — lived longer than any other U.S. president and had the longest post-presidency. His grandson, Jason Carter, spoke at the Democratic National Convention and said that the former president was looking forward to voting for Kamala Harris. In 1974, not even five months after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Carter entered the race for the Democratic nomination as a virtual unknown. At the time, Gallup polled a list of 31 possible Democratic contenders, and Carter’s name didn’t even make the list, according to The New York Times. Then in his first and only term as governor of Georgia, Carter had even appeared on the game show What’s My Line?, to a maskless panel that had trouble identifying who he was. Carter used his political anonymity to his advantage, running as an outsider who could bring to Washington just the type of integrity and personal morality needed in the aftermath of the Watergate era. His decision to campaign heavily in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses proved fortuitous, as he used the media attention from his unexpected showing as springboard for the rest of the nomination contests. In Hollywood, the relatively young Carter became a celebrity in his own right, forging ties with Lew Wasserman that gave him an entree into fundraising and celebrity circuit. That proved to be a lifeline at key moments in the campaign: At one point, according to The Washington Post , Carter’s campaign was so broke that Wasserman quickly organized a fundraiser that got the campaign a badly needed $200,000. After securing the nomination, Carter was initially way ahead of his rival, President Gerald R. Ford, who was hurt by his decision to pardon Nixon as well as an intra party battle with its conservative wing. The gap narrowed in the final weeks of the campaign, though, after Carter, a born-again Baptist, gave an interview to Playboy in which he said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter still won the election, but by a rather narrow 297-240 electoral votes. His victory was greeted as a new era of good government in Washington — the Carter smile a contrast to the scowl of Nixon. The fact that he was from Georgia was touted as a sign of a new South, built on the rather superficial idea that the racial divisions of the 1960s were in the past. Pop culture seized on the moment with light-hearted movies like Smokey and the Bandit and TV series like The Dukes of Hazzard that generally presented the region as one of rednecks and good ole’ boys. ABC even scheduled a rural sitcom, Carter Country, that ran for two seasons. In the first line of his inauguration speech, Carter thanked Ford “for all he has done to heal our land,” but the new president signaled a shift to a center-left approach to government. In the White House, Carter shunned the pomp in favor of a more populist image: He did away with the playing of Hail to the Chief at ceremonies, and resurrected Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats, as he instructed Americans on conservation during the ongoing energy crisis. Even with large majorities of Democrats in the House and Senate, however, Carter’s early days in D.C. drew friction. A scandal forced a close aide, Bert Lance, from office, while the administration’s clashes with Democrats in Congress, on such things as pork barrel spending, hurt his agenda. His leadership style drew criticism for a lack of delegation. One widely shared story was that he even oversaw the schedule for play on the White House tennis court, although Stuart Eizenstat, said that Carter only wanted to ensure that he or First Lady Rosalynn Carter weren’t using it at the same time. “The notion that he micromanaged the schedule is just incorrect, but it fit in with this notion of excessive attention to detail. It was actually an act of huge generosity to his staff,” Eizenstat said at the National Book Festival in 2018. Carter’s energy policy was later seen as prescient, decades before climate change became a national priority with a solution to conserve and wean the public off of fossil fuels. The energy crisis of 1979 saw Americans again facing long lines at gas stations. Carter gave a nationally televised speech that summer, when he said that the problem was a “crisis of confidence.” “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” Although he never used the word, it became to be known as the “malaise” speech, contributing to the impression that Carter’s administration was flailing. The pinnacle of his presidency came on Sept. 17, 1978, when, following 12 days at Camp David, he announced a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, with a treaty signed the following year. Broadcasters interrupted their regular primetime programming — which that night included the Emmy Awards — to cover the deal. His foreign policy successes, though, were overshadowed by the Iranian hostage crisis. In November, 1979, following the revolution that ousted the U.S. supported Shah, a group of students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 diplomats and citizens hostage. The resulting attempts to free the hostages consumed Carter’s presidency. A rescue attempt on April 24, 1980 failed after helicopter crashes forced the mission to be aborted. Each night, Americans were reminded of the crisis on TV, as ABC created nightly reports called America Held Hostage with Ted Koppel, the forerunner to Nightline. Despite the ongoing crisis Carter was still viewed as having an incumbency advantage going into the 1980 presidential race, but his political fortunes turned as he faced a serious primary challenge from Edward Kennedy. Although he beat him for the presidential nomination, the intra-party battle left Democrats divided. More bruising to Carter’s political fortunes, though, was stagflation, or rising inflation combined with slowing economic growth and high unemployment. A recession in early 1980 coincided with the start of Carter’s reelection campaign. On the right, Ronald Reagan secured the Republican nomination with a mix of personal charisma and an ability to connect with working class voters, who came to be known as Reagan Democrats, disaffected with the state of the economy. Although Carter and his team tried to characterize Reagan as too extreme and untrustworthy, the former actor turned in a superior debate performance, in part with just one line in response to the incumbent president’s criticisms: “There you go again.” Reagan’s landslide was a bruising defeat for Carter, who was relatively young, 56, when he left office. He sold off his peanut business, then in deep debt , to Archer Daniels Midland, and earned a generous advance for his memoirs, Keeping Faith , the first of dozens of more books. But far from retiring, Carter pursued some of the human rights policy focus of his White House tenure. He built houses for Habitat for Humanity. He tried to solve the problem of Guinea worm disease in African countries and other regions, and, with his initiative, it has been nearly eradicated. He supervised elections. At times he acted as a peace broker, as he did during the Camp David accords. More than 20 years after leaving office, in 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “War may sometimes be a necessary evil,” Carter said in his acceptance speech. “But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” After his presidency, he and Rosalynn returned to Plains, GA, where they continued to be active members of the community. The former president’s regular Sunday school lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church became a stopping point for politicians and tourists until he was well into his 90s. In a profile in 2018, The Washington Post reported that Carter was “the only president of the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics.” The Carters’ two-bedroom ranch home was assessed at $167,000, less than the cost of the Secret Service vehicles parked outside, the Post noted. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924. He was raised in Plains and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. He left his naval career in the 1950s to focus on the family business, peanut farming. At the time, Georgia was defiant in its resistance to segregation, but Carter spoke out in favor of school integration. He entered state politics in 1962 and was elected to the state senate, in an unlikely campaign that foreshadowed his work as an international election observer. He lost the Democratic primary, but proved widespread vote fraud orchestrated by a local political boss. Among other things, 117 voters had allegedly lined up in alphabetical order to cast their ballots, a fact that Carter recounted in his 2015 book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. He eventually got on the general election ballot and won. Carter ran for governor of Georgia in 1966, but lost the primary to segregationist Lester Maddox. Carter ran against in 1970 and won. Carter is survived by three sons, John William (Jack), James Earl III (Chip) and Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff) and a daughter, Amy Lynn. His wife, Rosalynn, died in November 2023. They had been married for 77 years, longer than any presidential couple.Are Amazon’s drones finally ready for prime time?Summit Therapeutics Inc. ( NASDAQ:SMMT – Get Free Report ) dropped 6.2% during trading on Friday . The stock traded as low as $17.98 and last traded at $18.09. Approximately 882,894 shares were traded during mid-day trading, a decline of 74% from the average daily volume of 3,409,062 shares. The stock had previously closed at $19.28. Analyst Ratings Changes Several equities research analysts recently weighed in on the stock. Stifel Nicolaus upped their target price on shares of Summit Therapeutics from $25.00 to $40.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research note on Wednesday, September 25th. JMP Securities assumed coverage on Summit Therapeutics in a research report on Monday, November 4th. They set a “market outperform” rating and a $32.00 price objective on the stock. Citigroup lowered Summit Therapeutics from a “buy” rating to a “neutral” rating and lifted their target price for the company from $19.00 to $23.00 in a report on Friday, September 27th. HC Wainwright reissued a “buy” rating and set a $44.00 target price on shares of Summit Therapeutics in a research note on Monday, November 18th. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company began coverage on Summit Therapeutics in a research report on Wednesday, December 11th. They issued an “overweight” rating and a $30.00 price target on the stock. One research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $33.33. Read Our Latest Research Report on Summit Therapeutics Summit Therapeutics Price Performance Institutional Investors Weigh In On Summit Therapeutics Several institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in SMMT. Principal Financial Group Inc. raised its holdings in Summit Therapeutics by 60.9% during the third quarter. Principal Financial Group Inc. now owns 58,147 shares of the company’s stock worth $1,273,000 after purchasing an additional 22,014 shares in the last quarter. Franklin Resources Inc. purchased a new position in shares of Summit Therapeutics in the 3rd quarter valued at $2,091,000. Virtu Financial LLC acquired a new stake in Summit Therapeutics during the 3rd quarter worth $925,000. Geode Capital Management LLC lifted its position in Summit Therapeutics by 4.6% in the third quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 3,099,808 shares of the company’s stock valued at $67,899,000 after acquiring an additional 135,981 shares during the last quarter. Finally, XTX Topco Ltd boosted its stake in Summit Therapeutics by 54.3% in the third quarter. XTX Topco Ltd now owns 23,915 shares of the company’s stock valued at $524,000 after acquiring an additional 8,415 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 4.61% of the company’s stock. About Summit Therapeutics ( Get Free Report ) Summit Therapeutics Inc, a biopharmaceutical company, focuses on discovery, development, and commercialization of patient, physician, caregiver, and societal friendly medicinal therapies in the United States, and the United Kingdom. The company’s lead development candidate is Ivonescimab, a bispecific antibody for immunotherapy through blockade of PD-1 with the anti-angiogenesis; and anti-infectives portfolio includes SMT-738, a novel class of precision antibiotics for the treatment of multidrug resistant infections, which primarily includes carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae infections. Recommended Stories Receive News & Ratings for Summit Therapeutics Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Summit Therapeutics and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter .
Jimmy Carter , who followed a principled yet tumultuous single term in the White House with a post-presidency dedicated to human rights and peace advocacy, has died. At 100, Carter — who was born on Oct. 1, 1924 — lived longer than any other U.S. president and had the longest post-presidency. His grandson, Jason Carter, spoke at the Democratic National Convention and said that the former president was looking forward to voting for Kamala Harris. In 1974, not even five months after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Carter entered the race for the Democratic nomination as a virtual unknown. At the time, Gallup polled a list of 31 possible Democratic contenders, and Carter’s name didn’t even make the list, according to The New York Times. Then in his first and only term as governor of Georgia, Carter had even appeared on the game show What’s My Line?, to a maskless panel that had trouble identifying who he was. Carter used his political anonymity to his advantage, running as an outsider who could bring to Washington just the type of integrity and personal morality needed in the aftermath of the Watergate era. His decision to campaign heavily in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses proved fortuitous, as he used the media attention from his unexpected showing as springboard for the rest of the nomination contests. In Hollywood, the relatively young Carter became a celebrity in his own right, forging ties with Lew Wasserman that gave him an entree into fundraising and celebrity circuit. That proved to be a lifeline at key moments in the campaign: At one point, according to The Washington Post , Carter’s campaign was so broke that Wasserman quickly organized a fundraiser that got the campaign a badly needed $200,000. After securing the nomination, Carter was initially way ahead of his rival, President Gerald R. Ford, who was hurt by his decision to pardon Nixon as well as an intra party battle with its conservative wing. The gap narrowed in the final weeks of the campaign, though, after Carter, a born-again Baptist, gave an interview to Playboy in which he said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter still won the election, but by a rather narrow 297-240 electoral votes. His victory was greeted as a new era of good government in Washington — the Carter smile a contrast to the scowl of Nixon. The fact that he was from Georgia was touted as a sign of a new South, built on the rather superficial idea that the racial divisions of the 1960s were in the past. Pop culture seized on the moment with light-hearted movies like Smokey and the Bandit and TV series like The Dukes of Hazzard that generally presented the region as one of rednecks and good ole’ boys. ABC even scheduled a rural sitcom, Carter Country, that ran for two seasons. In the first line of his inauguration speech, Carter thanked Ford “for all he has done to heal our land,” but the new president signaled a shift to a center-left approach to government. In the White House, Carter shunned the pomp in favor of a more populist image: He did away with the playing of Hail to the Chief at ceremonies, and resurrected Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats, as he instructed Americans on conservation during the ongoing energy crisis. Even with large majorities of Democrats in the House and Senate, however, Carter’s early days in D.C. drew friction. A scandal forced a close aide, Bert Lance, from office, while the administration’s clashes with Democrats in Congress, on such things as pork barrel spending, hurt his agenda. His leadership style drew criticism for a lack of delegation. One widely shared story was that he even oversaw the schedule for play on the White House tennis court, although Stuart Eizenstat, said that Carter only wanted to ensure that he or First Lady Rosalynn Carter weren’t using it at the same time. “The notion that he micromanaged the schedule is just incorrect, but it fit in with this notion of excessive attention to detail. It was actually an act of huge generosity to his staff,” Eizenstat said at the National Book Festival in 2018. Carter’s energy policy was later seen as prescient, decades before climate change became a national priority with a solution to conserve and wean the public off of fossil fuels. The energy crisis of 1979 saw Americans again facing long lines at gas stations. Carter gave a nationally televised speech that summer, when he said that the problem was a “crisis of confidence.” “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” Although he never used the word, it became to be known as the “malaise” speech, contributing to the impression that Carter’s administration was flailing. The pinnacle of his presidency came on Sept. 17, 1978, when, following 12 days at Camp David, he announced a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, with a treaty signed the following year. Broadcasters interrupted their regular primetime programming — which that night included the Emmy Awards — to cover the deal. His foreign policy successes, though, were overshadowed by the Iranian hostage crisis. In November, 1979, following the revolution that ousted the U.S. supported Shah, a group of students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 diplomats and citizens hostage. The resulting attempts to free the hostages consumed Carter’s presidency. A rescue attempt on April 24, 1980 failed after helicopter crashes forced the mission to be aborted. Each night, Americans were reminded of the crisis on TV, as ABC created nightly reports called America Held Hostage with Ted Koppel, the forerunner to Nightline. Despite the ongoing crisis Carter was still viewed as having an incumbency advantage going into the 1980 presidential race, but his political fortunes turned as he faced a serious primary challenge from Edward Kennedy. Although he beat him for the presidential nomination, the intra-party battle left Democrats divided. More bruising to Carter’s political fortunes, though, was stagflation, or rising inflation combined with slowing economic growth and high unemployment. A recession in early 1980 coincided with the start of Carter’s reelection campaign. On the right, Ronald Reagan secured the Republican nomination with a mix of personal charisma and an ability to connect with working class voters, who came to be known as Reagan Democrats, disaffected with the state of the economy. Although Carter and his team tried to characterize Reagan as too extreme and untrustworthy, the former actor turned in a superior debate performance, in part with just one line in response to the incumbent president’s criticisms: “There you go again.” Reagan’s landslide was a bruising defeat for Carter, who was relatively young, 56, when he left office. He sold off his peanut business, then in deep debt , to Archer Daniels Midland, and earned a generous advance for his memoirs, Keeping Faith , the first of dozens of more books. But far from retiring, Carter pursued some of the human rights policy focus of his White House tenure. He built houses for Habitat for Humanity. He tried to solve the problem of Guinea worm disease in African countries and other regions, and, with his initiative, it has been nearly eradicated. He supervised elections. At times he acted as a peace broker, as he did during the Camp David accords. More than 20 years after leaving office, in 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “War may sometimes be a necessary evil,” Carter said in his acceptance speech. “But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” After his presidency, he and Rosalynn returned to Plains, GA, where they continued to be active members of the community. The former president’s regular Sunday school lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church became a stopping point for politicians and tourists until he was well into his 90s. In a profile in 2018, The Washington Post reported that Carter was “the only president of the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics.” The Carters’ two-bedroom ranch home was assessed at $167,000, less than the cost of the Secret Service vehicles parked outside, the Post noted. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924. He was raised in Plains and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. He left his naval career in the 1950s to focus on the family business, peanut farming. At the time, Georgia was defiant in its resistance to segregation, but Carter spoke out in favor of school integration. He entered state politics in 1962 and was elected to the state senate, in an unlikely campaign that foreshadowed his work as an international election observer. He lost the Democratic primary, but proved widespread vote fraud orchestrated by a local political boss. Among other things, 117 voters had allegedly lined up in alphabetical order to cast their ballots, a fact that Carter recounted in his 2015 book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. He eventually got on the general election ballot and won. Carter ran for governor of Georgia in 1966, but lost the primary to segregationist Lester Maddox. Carter ran against in 1970 and won. Carter is survived by three sons, John William (Jack), James Earl III (Chip) and Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff) and a daughter, Amy Lynn. His wife, Rosalynn, died in November 2023. They had been married for 77 years, longer than any presidential couple.
The FBI secured permission to record the phone calls of former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle in October 2014, in the early stages of what turned out to be a massive corruption investigation in which Solis Doyle was never charged, an agent testified Thursday. The investigation was not related to the presidential campaign, instead focusing on Solis Doyle’s brother’s dealings in the Chicago City Council. The disclosure came during the testimony of veteran FBI Special Agent Ryan McDonald, who in June 2016 confronted Doyle’s brother, then-Ald. Danny Solis (25th). The FBI had wiretapped Danny Solis’ phone for several months in 2014 and 2015. Along the way, McDonald testified that they overheard the siblings discussing how to split a $100,000 payment the developer of the Nobu Hotel offered to Patti Solis Doyle. That development wound up being featured in a 2016 FBI affidavit first obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times in January 2019. The wiretap on Patti Solis Doyle’s phone was not fruitful and did not “last longer than several months,” McDonald told jurors, confirming his testimony was the first public disclosure of the recording. Through a spokesperson, Solis Doyle declined to comment. McDonald testified in the racketeering conspiracy trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan and his longtime ally, Michael McClain. Madigan is accused of leading a criminal enterprise designed to enhance his political power and enrich his allies. Danny Solis was spotted in Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Courthouse on Thursday and was expected to take the witness stand in short order. He began cooperating with the FBI in 2016 and continued until the Sun-Times revealed his undercover work in January 2019. McDonald confirmed for a prosecutor Thursday that Solis’ cover was “blown” by the newspaper’s reporting. Patti Solis Doyle managed Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid. Her name surfaced Thursday along with Brian Hynes, a onetime legislative aide to Madigan, in relation to the Nobu Hotel project. Doyle and Hynes were co-founders of a business founded in 2010 — Vendor Assistance Program — that made money as an intermediary in getting vendors money the state of Illinois owed them. She sold her interest in the company in 2016. VAP and other companies front unpaid state contractors most of what Springfield owes them, and VAP and other “qualified purchasers” later pocket the late-payment penalties from the state. For VAP, that business has proven to be wildly successful, especially at a time when the state owed heavily to many vendors. Disclosures the company is required to file with the state show that through July, VAP had collected nearly $396 million in late-payment penalties from Illinois taxpayers over more than a decade. Solis Doyle grew up with her brother Danny Solis in Pilsen, attended Notre Dame High School for Girls on the Northwest Side and got a communications degree from Northwestern University. Danny Solis helped her land a job at City Hall, where she ended up working on campaigns for former city Treasurer Miriam Santos and former Mayor Richard M. Daley. Solis Doyle earned the trust of David Wilhelm, who managed Daley’s 1989 campaign as well as former President Bill Clinton’s first successful White House run in 1992. Wilhelm brought Solis Doyle into the tightknit political orbit of the Clinton family, where Solis Doyle started out as a scheduler for Hillary Clinton. Solis Doyle went on to help run Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaigns, led Clinton’s political action committee and then managed her 2008 presidential campaign. After Barack Obama beat Clinton for the nomination that year, Solis Doyle jumped to his campaign as chief of staff to then-vice presidential nominee Joe Biden. She was also an adviser on Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. For years, Solis Doyle has lived in Washington, D.C., where she’s head of U.S. public affairs for a massive advisory firm. Contributing: Anthony VazquezBy BILL BARROW, Associated Press ATLANTA (AP) — Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who won the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, endured humbling defeat after one tumultuous term and then redefined life after the White House as a global humanitarian, has died. He was 100 years old. The longest-lived American president died on Sunday, more than a year after entering hospice care , at his home in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023 , spent most of their lives, The Carter Center said. Businessman, Navy officer, evangelist, politician, negotiator, author, woodworker, citizen of the world — Carter forged a path that still challenges political assumptions and stands out among the 45 men who reached the nation’s highest office. The 39th president leveraged his ambition with a keen intellect, deep religious faith and prodigious work ethic, conducting diplomatic missions into his 80s and building houses for the poor well into his 90s. “My faith demands — this is not optional — my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have to try to make a difference,” Carter once said. A moderate Democrat, Carter entered the 1976 presidential race as a little-known Georgia governor with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist mores and technocratic plans reflecting his education as an engineer. His no-frills campaign depended on public financing, and his promise not to deceive the American people resonated after Richard Nixon’s disgrace and U.S. defeat in southeast Asia. “If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president,” Carter repeated before narrowly beating Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, who had lost popularity pardoning Nixon. Carter governed amid Cold War pressures, turbulent oil markets and social upheaval over racism, women’s rights and America’s global role. His most acclaimed achievement in office was a Mideast peace deal that he brokered by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the bargaining table for 13 days in 1978. That Camp David experience inspired the post-presidential center where Carter would establish so much of his legacy. Yet Carter’s electoral coalition splintered under double-digit inflation, gasoline lines and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. His bleakest hour came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure his landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan. Carter acknowledged in his 2020 “White House Diary” that he could be “micromanaging” and “excessively autocratic,” complicating dealings with Congress and the federal bureaucracy. He also turned a cold shoulder to Washington’s news media and lobbyists, not fully appreciating their influence on his political fortunes. “It didn’t take us long to realize that the underestimation existed, but by that time we were not able to repair the mistake,” Carter told historians in 1982, suggesting that he had “an inherent incompatibility” with Washington insiders. Carter insisted his overall approach was sound and that he achieved his primary objectives — to “protect our nation’s security and interests peacefully” and “enhance human rights here and abroad” — even if he fell spectacularly short of a second term. Ignominious defeat, though, allowed for renewal. The Carters founded The Carter Center in 1982 as a first-of-its-kind base of operations, asserting themselves as international peacemakers and champions of democracy, public health and human rights. “I was not interested in just building a museum or storing my White House records and memorabilia,” Carter wrote in a memoir published after his 90th birthday. “I wanted a place where we could work.” That work included easing nuclear tensions in North and South Korea, helping to avert a U.S. invasion of Haiti and negotiating cease-fires in Bosnia and Sudan. By 2022, The Carter Center had declared at least 113 elections in Latin America, Asia and Africa to be free or fraudulent. Recently, the center began monitoring U.S. elections as well. Carter’s stubborn self-assuredness and even self-righteousness proved effective once he was unencumbered by the Washington order, sometimes to the point of frustrating his successors . He went “where others are not treading,” he said, to places like Ethiopia, Liberia and North Korea, where he secured the release of an American who had wandered across the border in 2010. “I can say what I like. I can meet whom I want. I can take on projects that please me and reject the ones that don’t,” Carter said. He announced an arms-reduction-for-aid deal with North Korea without clearing the details with Bill Clinton’s White House. He openly criticized President George W. Bush for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also criticized America’s approach to Israel with his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” And he repeatedly countered U.S. administrations by insisting North Korea should be included in international affairs, a position that most aligned Carter with Republican President Donald Trump. Among the center’s many public health initiatives, Carter vowed to eradicate the guinea worm parasite during his lifetime, and nearly achieved it: Cases dropped from millions in the 1980s to nearly a handful. With hardhats and hammers, the Carters also built homes with Habitat for Humanity. The Nobel committee’s 2002 Peace Prize cites his “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” Carter should have won it alongside Sadat and Begin in 1978, the chairman added. Carter accepted the recognition saying there was more work to be done. “The world is now, in many ways, a more dangerous place,” he said. “The greater ease of travel and communication has not been matched by equal understanding and mutual respect.” Carter’s globetrotting took him to remote villages where he met little “Jimmy Carters,” so named by admiring parents. But he spent most of his days in the same one-story Plains house — expanded and guarded by Secret Service agents — where they lived before he became governor. He regularly taught Sunday School lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church until his mobility declined and the coronavirus pandemic raged. Those sessions drew visitors from around the world to the small sanctuary where Carter will receive his final send-off after a state funeral at Washington’s National Cathedral. The common assessment that he was a better ex-president than president rankled Carter and his allies. His prolific post-presidency gave him a brand above politics, particularly for Americans too young to witness him in office. But Carter also lived long enough to see biographers and historians reassess his White House years more generously. His record includes the deregulation of key industries, reduction of U.S. dependence on foreign oil, cautious management of the national debt and notable legislation on the environment, education and mental health. He focused on human rights in foreign policy, pressuring dictators to release thousands of political prisoners . He acknowledged America’s historical imperialism, pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders and relinquished control of the Panama Canal. He normalized relations with China. “I am not nominating Jimmy Carter for a place on Mount Rushmore,” Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy director, wrote in a 2018 book. “He was not a great president” but also not the “hapless and weak” caricature voters rejected in 1980, Eizenstat said. Rather, Carter was “good and productive” and “delivered results, many of which were realized only after he left office.” Madeleine Albright, a national security staffer for Carter and Clinton’s secretary of state, wrote in Eizenstat’s forward that Carter was “consequential and successful” and expressed hope that “perceptions will continue to evolve” about his presidency. “Our country was lucky to have him as our leader,” said Albright, who died in 2022. Jonathan Alter, who penned a comprehensive Carter biography published in 2020, said in an interview that Carter should be remembered for “an epic American life” spanning from a humble start in a home with no electricity or indoor plumbing through decades on the world stage across two centuries. “He will likely go down as one of the most misunderstood and underestimated figures in American history,” Alter told The Associated Press. James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains and spent his early years in nearby Archery. His family was a minority in the mostly Black community, decades before the civil rights movement played out at the dawn of Carter’s political career. Carter, who campaigned as a moderate on race relations but governed more progressively, talked often of the influence of his Black caregivers and playmates but also noted his advantages: His land-owning father sat atop Archery’s tenant-farming system and owned a main street grocery. His mother, Lillian , would become a staple of his political campaigns. Seeking to broaden his world beyond Plains and its population of fewer than 1,000 — then and now — Carter won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1946. That same year he married Rosalynn Smith, another Plains native, a decision he considered more important than any he made as head of state. She shared his desire to see the world, sacrificing college to support his Navy career. Carter climbed in rank to lieutenant, but then his father was diagnosed with cancer, so the submarine officer set aside his ambitions of admiralty and moved the family back to Plains. His decision angered Rosalynn, even as she dived into the peanut business alongside her husband. Carter again failed to talk with his wife before his first run for office — he later called it “inconceivable” not to have consulted her on such major life decisions — but this time, she was on board. “My wife is much more political,” Carter told the AP in 2021. He won a state Senate seat in 1962 but wasn’t long for the General Assembly and its back-slapping, deal-cutting ways. He ran for governor in 1966 — losing to arch-segregationist Lester Maddox — and then immediately focused on the next campaign. Carter had spoken out against church segregation as a Baptist deacon and opposed racist “Dixiecrats” as a state senator. Yet as a local school board leader in the 1950s he had not pushed to end school segregation even after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, despite his private support for integration. And in 1970, Carter ran for governor again as the more conservative Democrat against Carl Sanders, a wealthy businessman Carter mocked as “Cufflinks Carl.” Sanders never forgave him for anonymous, race-baiting flyers, which Carter disavowed. Ultimately, Carter won his races by attracting both Black voters and culturally conservative whites. Once in office, he was more direct. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he declared in his 1971 inaugural address, setting a new standard for Southern governors that landed him on the cover of Time magazine. His statehouse initiatives included environmental protection, boosting rural education and overhauling antiquated executive branch structures. He proclaimed Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the slain civil rights leader’s home state. And he decided, as he received presidential candidates in 1972, that they were no more talented than he was. In 1974, he ran Democrats’ national campaign arm. Then he declared his own candidacy for 1976. An Atlanta newspaper responded with the headline: “Jimmy Who?” The Carters and a “Peanut Brigade” of family members and Georgia supporters camped out in Iowa and New Hampshire, establishing both states as presidential proving grounds. His first Senate endorsement: a young first-termer from Delaware named Joe Biden. Yet it was Carter’s ability to navigate America’s complex racial and rural politics that cemented the nomination. He swept the Deep South that November, the last Democrat to do so, as many white Southerners shifted to Republicans in response to civil rights initiatives. A self-declared “born-again Christian,” Carter drew snickers by referring to Scripture in a Playboy magazine interview, saying he “had looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” The remarks gave Ford a new foothold and television comedians pounced — including NBC’s new “Saturday Night Live” show. But voters weary of cynicism in politics found it endearing. Carter chose Minnesota Sen. Walter “Fritz” Mondale as his running mate on a “Grits and Fritz” ticket. In office, he elevated the vice presidency and the first lady’s office. Mondale’s governing partnership was a model for influential successors Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Biden. Rosalynn Carter was one of the most involved presidential spouses in history, welcomed into Cabinet meetings and huddles with lawmakers and top aides. The Carters presided with uncommon informality: He used his nickname “Jimmy” even when taking the oath of office, carried his own luggage and tried to silence the Marine Band’s “Hail to the Chief.” They bought their clothes off the rack. Carter wore a cardigan for a White House address, urging Americans to conserve energy by turning down their thermostats. Amy, the youngest of four children, attended District of Columbia public school. Washington’s social and media elite scorned their style. But the larger concern was that “he hated politics,” according to Eizenstat, leaving him nowhere to turn politically once economic turmoil and foreign policy challenges took their toll. Carter partially deregulated the airline, railroad and trucking industries and established the departments of Education and Energy, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He designated millions of acres of Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges. He appointed a then-record number of women and nonwhite people to federal posts. He never had a Supreme Court nomination, but he elevated civil rights attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second highest court, positioning her for a promotion in 1993. He appointed Paul Volker, the Federal Reserve chairman whose policies would help the economy boom in the 1980s — after Carter left office. He built on Nixon’s opening with China, and though he tolerated autocrats in Asia, pushed Latin America from dictatorships to democracy. But he couldn’t immediately tame inflation or the related energy crisis. And then came Iran. After he admitted the exiled Shah of Iran to the U.S. for medical treatment, the American Embassy in Tehran was overrun in 1979 by followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Negotiations to free the hostages broke down repeatedly ahead of the failed rescue attempt. The same year, Carter signed SALT II, the new strategic arms treaty with Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union, only to pull it back, impose trade sanctions and order a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Hoping to instill optimism, he delivered what the media dubbed his “malaise” speech, although he didn’t use that word. He declared the nation was suffering “a crisis of confidence.” By then, many Americans had lost confidence in the president, not themselves. Carter campaigned sparingly for reelection because of the hostage crisis, instead sending Rosalynn as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy challenged him for the Democratic nomination. Carter famously said he’d “kick his ass,” but was hobbled by Kennedy as Reagan rallied a broad coalition with “make America great again” appeals and asking voters whether they were “better off than you were four years ago.” Reagan further capitalized on Carter’s lecturing tone, eviscerating him in their lone fall debate with the quip: “There you go again.” Carter lost all but six states and Republicans rolled to a new Senate majority. Carter successfully negotiated the hostages’ freedom after the election, but in one final, bitter turn of events, Tehran waited until hours after Carter left office to let them walk free. At 56, Carter returned to Georgia with “no idea what I would do with the rest of my life.” Four decades after launching The Carter Center, he still talked of unfinished business. “I thought when we got into politics we would have resolved everything,” Carter told the AP in 2021. “But it’s turned out to be much more long-lasting and insidious than I had thought it was. I think in general, the world itself is much more divided than in previous years.” Still, he affirmed what he said when he underwent treatment for a cancer diagnosis in his 10th decade of life. “I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” he said in 2015 . “I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve had thousands of friends, I’ve had an exciting, adventurous and gratifying existence.” ___ Former Associated Press journalist Alex Sanz contributed to this report.
