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711 hotline number PLAINS, Ga. – Newly married and sworn as a Naval officer, Jimmy Carter left his tiny hometown in 1946 hoping to climb the ranks and see the world. Less than a decade later, the death of his father and namesake, a merchant farmer and local politician who went by “Mr. Earl,” prompted the submariner and his wife, Rosalynn, to return to the rural life of Plains, Georgia, they thought they’d escaped. Recommended Videos The lieutenant never would be an admiral. Instead, he became commander in chief. Years after his presidency ended in humbling defeat, he would add a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded not for his White House accomplishments but “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The life of James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th and longest-lived U.S. president, ended Sunday at the age of 100 where it began: Plains, the town of 600 that fueled his political rise, welcomed him after his fall and sustained him during 40 years of service that redefined what it means to be a former president. With the stubborn confidence of an engineer and an optimism rooted in his Baptist faith, Carter described his motivations in politics and beyond in the same way: an almost missionary zeal to solve problems and improve lives. Carter was raised amid racism, abject poverty and hard rural living — realities that shaped both his deliberate politics and emphasis on human rights. “He always felt a responsibility to help people,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend of Carter's in Plains. “And when he couldn’t make change wherever he was, he decided he had to go higher.” Defying expectations Carter's path, a mix of happenstance and calculation , pitted moral imperatives against political pragmatism; and it defied typical labels of American politics, especially caricatures of one-term presidents as failures. “We shouldn’t judge presidents by how popular they are in their day. That's a very narrow way of assessing them," Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Associated Press. “We should judge them by how they changed the country and the world for the better. On that score, Jimmy Carter is not in the first rank of American presidents, but he stands up quite well.” Later in life, Carter conceded that many Americans, even those too young to remember his tenure, judged him ineffective for failing to contain inflation or interest rates, end the energy crisis or quickly bring home American hostages in Iran. He gained admirers instead for his work at The Carter Center — advocating globally for public health, human rights and democracy since 1982 — and the decades he and Rosalynn wore hardhats and swung hammers with Habitat for Humanity. Yet the common view that he was better after the Oval Office than in it annoyed Carter, and his allies relished him living long enough to see historians reassess his presidency. “He doesn’t quite fit in today’s terms” of a left-right, red-blue scoreboard, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the former president multiple times during his own White House bid. At various points in his political career, Carter labeled himself “progressive” or “conservative” — sometimes both at once. His most ambitious health care bill failed — perhaps one of his biggest legislative disappointments — because it didn’t go far enough to suit liberals. Republicans, especially after his 1980 defeat, cast him as a left-wing cartoon. It would be easiest to classify Carter as a centrist, Buttigieg said, “but there’s also something radical about the depth of his commitment to looking after those who are left out of society and out of the economy.” ‘Country come to town’ Indeed, Carter’s legacy is stitched with complexities, contradictions and evolutions — personal and political. The self-styled peacemaker was a war-trained Naval Academy graduate who promised Democratic challenger Ted Kennedy that he’d “kick his ass.” But he campaigned with a call to treat everyone with “respect and compassion and with love.” Carter vowed to restore America’s virtue after the shame of Vietnam and Watergate, and his technocratic, good-government approach didn't suit Republicans who tagged government itself as the problem. It also sometimes put Carter at odds with fellow Democrats. The result still was a notable legislative record, with wins on the environment, education, and mental health care. He dramatically expanded federally protected lands, began deregulating air travel, railroads and trucking, and he put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. As a fiscal hawk, Carter added a relative pittance to the national debt, unlike successors from both parties. Carter nonetheless struggled to make his achievements resonate with the electorate he charmed in 1976. Quoting Bob Dylan and grinning enthusiastically, he had promised voters he would “never tell a lie.” Once in Washington, though, he led like a joyless engineer, insisting his ideas would become reality and he'd be rewarded politically if only he could convince enough people with facts and logic. This served him well at Camp David, where he brokered peace between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Epypt’s Anwar Sadat, an experience that later sparked the idea of The Carter Center in Atlanta. Carter's tenacity helped the center grow to a global force that monitored elections across five continents, enabled his freelance diplomacy and sent public health experts across the developing world. The center’s wins were personal for Carter, who hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite, and nearly did. As president, though, the approach fell short when he urged consumers beleaguered by energy costs to turn down their thermostats. Or when he tried to be the nation’s cheerleader, beseeching Americans to overcome a collective “crisis of confidence.” Republican Ronald Reagan exploited Carter's lecturing tone with a belittling quip in their lone 1980 debate. “There you go again,” the former Hollywood actor said in response to a wonky answer from the sitting president. “The Great Communicator” outpaced Carter in all but six states. Carter later suggested he “tried to do too much, too soon” and mused that he was incompatible with Washington culture: media figures, lobbyists and Georgetown social elites who looked down on the Georgians and their inner circle as “country come to town.” A ‘leader of conscience’ on race and class Carter carefully navigated divides on race and class on his way to the Oval Office. Born Oct. 1, 1924 , Carter was raised in the mostly Black community of Archery, just outside Plains, by a progressive mother and white supremacist father. Their home had no running water or electricity but the future president still grew up with the relative advantages of a locally prominent, land-owning family in a system of Jim Crow segregation. He wrote of President Franklin Roosevelt’s towering presence and his family’s Democratic Party roots, but his father soured on FDR, and Jimmy Carter never campaigned or governed as a New Deal liberal. He offered himself as a small-town peanut farmer with an understated style, carrying his own luggage, bunking with supporters during his first presidential campaign and always using his nickname. And he began his political career in a whites-only Democratic Party. As private citizens, he and Rosalynn supported integration as early as the 1950s and believed it inevitable. Carter refused to join the White Citizens Council in Plains and spoke out in his Baptist church against denying Black people access to worship services. “This is not my house; this is not your house,” he said in a churchwide meeting, reminding fellow parishioners their sanctuary belonged to God. Yet as the appointed chairman of Sumter County schools he never pushed to desegregate, thinking it impractical after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision. And while presidential candidate Carter would hail the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson when Carter was a state senator, there is no record of Carter publicly supporting it at the time. Carter overcame a ballot-stuffing opponent to win his legislative seat, then lost the 1966 governor's race to an arch-segregationist. He won four years later by avoiding explicit mentions of race and campaigning to the right of his rival, who he mocked as “Cufflinks Carl” — the insult of an ascendant politician who never saw himself as part the establishment. Carter’s rural and small-town coalition in 1970 would match any victorious Republican electoral map in 2024. Once elected, though, Carter shocked his white conservative supporters — and landed on the cover of Time magazine — by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Before making the jump to Washington, Carter befriended the family of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whom he’d never sought out as he eyed the governor’s office. Carter lamented his foot-dragging on school integration as a “mistake.” But he also met, conspicuously, with Alabama's segregationist Gov. George Wallace to accept his primary rival's endorsement ahead of the 1976 Democratic convention. “He very shrewdly took advantage of his own Southerness,” said Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor and expert on Carter’s campaigns. A coalition of Black voters and white moderate Democrats ultimately made Carter the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South. Then, just as he did in Georgia, he used his power in office to appoint more non-whites than all his predecessors had, combined. He once acknowledged “the secret shame” of white Americans who didn’t fight segregation. But he also told Alter that doing more would have sacrificed his political viability – and thus everything he accomplished in office and after. King's daughter, Bernice King, described Carter as wisely “strategic” in winning higher offices to enact change. “He was a leader of conscience,” she said in an interview. Rosalynn was Carter's closest advisor Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19 at the age of 96, was identified by both husband and wife as the “more political” of the pair; she sat in on Cabinet meetings and urged him to postpone certain priorities, like pressing the Senate to relinquish control of the Panama Canal. “Let that go until the second term,” she would sometimes say. The president, recalled her former aide Kathy Cade, retorted that he was “going to do what’s right” even if “it might cut short the time I have.” Rosalynn held firm, Cade said: “She’d remind him you have to win to govern.” Carter also was the first president to appoint multiple women as Cabinet officers. Yet by his own telling, his career sprouted from chauvinism in the Carters' early marriage: He did not consult Rosalynn when deciding to move back to Plains in 1953 or before launching his state Senate bid a decade later. Many years later, he called it “inconceivable” that he didn’t confer with the woman he described as his “full partner,” at home, in government and at The Carter Center. “We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn Carter told AP in 2021. So deep was their trust that when Carter remained tethered to the White House in 1980 as 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, it was Rosalynn who campaigned on her husband’s behalf. “I just loved it,” she said, despite the bitterness of defeat. Reevaluating his legacy Fair or not, the label of a disastrous presidency had leading Democrats keep their distance, at least publicly, for many years, but Carter managed to remain relevant, writing books and weighing in on societal challenges. He lamented widening wealth gaps and the influence of money in politics. He voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later declared that America had devolved from fully functioning democracy to “oligarchy.” Yet looking ahead to 2020, with Sanders running again, Carter warned Democrats not to “move to a very liberal program,” lest they help re-elect President Donald Trump. Carter scolded the Republican for his serial lies and threats to democracy, and chided the U.S. establishment for misunderstanding Trump’s populist appeal. He delighted in yearly convocations with Emory University freshmen, often asking them to guess how much he’d raised in his two general election campaigns. “Zero,” he’d gesture with a smile, explaining the public financing system candidates now avoid so they can raise billions. Carter still remained quite practical in partnering with wealthy corporations and foundations to advance Carter Center programs. Carter recognized that economic woes and the Iran crisis doomed his presidency, but offered no apologies for appointing Paul Volcker as the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate hikes would not curb inflation until Reagan's presidency. He was proud of getting all the hostages home without starting a shooting war, even though Tehran would not free them until Reagan's Inauguration Day. “Carter didn’t look at it” as a failure, Alter emphasized. “He said, ‘They came home safely.’ And that’s what he wanted.” Well into their 90s, the Carters greeted visitors at Plains’ Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday School and where he will have his last funeral before being buried on family property alongside Rosalynn . Carter, who made the congregation’s collection plates in his woodworking shop, still garnered headlines there, calling for women’s rights within religious institutions, many of which, he said, “subjugate” women in church and society. Carter was not one to dwell on regrets. “I am at peace with the accomplishments, regret the unrealized goals and utilize my former political position to enhance everything we do,” he wrote around his 90th birthday. Pilgrimages to Plains The politician who had supposedly hated Washington politics also enjoyed hosting Democratic presidential contenders as public pilgrimages to Plains became advantageous again. Carter sat with Buttigieg for the final time March 1, 2020, hours before the Indiana mayor ended his campaign and endorsed eventual winner Joe Biden. “He asked me how I thought the campaign was going,” Buttigieg said, recalling that Carter flashed his signature grin and nodded along as the young candidate, born a year after Carter left office, “put the best face” on the walloping he endured the day before in South Carolina. Never breaking his smile, the 95-year-old host fired back, “I think you ought to drop out.” “So matter of fact,” Buttigieg said with a laugh. “It was somehow encouraging.” Carter had lived enough, won plenty and lost enough to take the long view. “He talked a lot about coming from nowhere,” Buttigieg said, not just to attain the presidency but to leverage “all of the instruments you have in life” and “make the world more peaceful.” In his farewell address as president, Carter said as much to the country that had embraced and rejected him. “The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language,” he declared. “Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity and who suffer for the sake of justice — they are the patriots of this cause.” Carter pledged to remain engaged with and for them as he returned “home to the South where I was born and raised,” home to Plains, where that young lieutenant had indeed become “a fellow citizen of the world.” —- Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.

Former All-Pro Chad 'Ochocinco' Johnson says he used to soak ankles in teammates' urine to stay healthyISLAMABAD: Minister for Information and Broadcasting Attaullah Tarar has said that strict action will be taken against anyone participating in the protest in Islamabad as it has been declared illegal by Islamabad High Court (IHC), ARY News reported. Addressing a news conference in Islamabad on Saturday, he said there is no engagement with the PTI at any level. He clarified that contact was made with PTI Chairman Gohar Ali Khan only once in compliance with Islamabad High Court’s ruling and they have been informed that this protest is illegal. He said anyone participating in the protest will be arrested and face legal consequences. He said that both Islamabad and Punjab Police have been given clear instructions that no one will be allowed to take the law into their hands or damage public property. He said the PTI speaks the language of Pakistan’s enemies. Expressing satisfaction over improved economic indicators, the Information Minister said the stock market which is touching peak levels is reflection of conducive business environment in the country. He however regretted the PTI gives the protest call whenever any country announces to invest in Pakistan. He recalled that the PTI staged a sit-in when the Chinese President was about to come to Pakistan for the CPEC. He said the PTI also announced a protest on the occasion of SCO meeting. The Information Minister said the President of Belarus who is an excellent friend of Pakistan, is now paying a visit. He said Belarus will collaborate with Pakistan for local manufacturing of tractors. He said the Chief Minister Khyber Pakhtunkhwa should pay attention to the law and order situation of the province.A Broncos rookie is in line for his NFL debut. The team elevated offensive lineman Nick Gargiulo — a seventh-round (No. 256 overall) pick in the 2024 NFL draft — from their practice squad on Saturday ahead of Week 12 at the Las Vegas Raiders. The Broncos also elevated inside linebacker Zach Cunningham, as previously reported by The Denver Gazette . Gargiulo (6-5, 310) started seven games at center and five games at left guard in his final college season in 2023 at South Carolina. He spent three previous seasons at Yale (2018-22). Cunningham is being elevated for a third and final time this season before needing to be signed to the active roster. NFL Insider: Broncos rookies discuss why they dropped in draft and how it provided 'that extra chip on their shoulder' Broncos fines The NFL fined cornerback Pat Surtain $11,255 for a facemask penalty in the third quarter last week against Atlanta. The Broncos defeated the Falcons, 38-6, to improve to 6-5 on the season. All players may appeal fines. Briefly The Raiders (2-8) have not won a game since the Broncos beat them at home in Week 5. But tight end Adam Trautman said: “They still get paid to play, too. And they’ve still got really good players. Obviously, when I look at it from the defensive side of the ball, (DE) Maxx Crosby is arguably one of the best players in the entire NFL.” ... Crosby has 34 total tackles (11 for loss) and 6.5 sacks over nine games played this season. ... QB Bo Nix continues to inspire confidence in his wide receivers. Rookie Devaughn Vele said: “I feel like it’s just the trust. We’re both getting experience. ... Understanding the little nuances.”

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US to send $1.25 billion in weapons to Ukraine, pushing to get aid out before Biden leaves office WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials say the United States is expected to announce it will send another $1.25 billion in military assistance to Ukraine. It's part of a push by the Biden administration to get as much aid to Kyiv as possible before leaving office on Jan. 20. Officials say the large package of aid includes a significant amount of munitions, including for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems and the HAWK air defense system. It also will provide Stinger missiles and 155 mm- and 105 mm artillery rounds. The officials say they expect the announcement will be made on Monday. They spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public. An online debate over foreign workers in tech shows tensions in Trump's political coalition WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump’s supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in the president-elect’s political movement into public display. The argument previews fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare tensions between the newest flank of Trump’s movement — that is, wealthy members of the tech world who want more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump’s Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. A 9th telecoms firm has been hit by a massive Chinese espionage campaign, the White House says WASHINGTON (AP) — A top White House official says a ninth U.S. telecoms firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans. Administration officials said this month that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. But Anne Neuberger, a deputy national security adviser, said Friday that a ninth victim had been identified after the administration released guidance to companies about how to hunt for Chinese culprits in their networks. Israeli troops burn northern Gaza hospital after forcibly removing staff and patients, officials say DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Gaza's Health Ministry says Israeli troops have stormed one of the last hospitals operating in the territory's north on Friday and forced many of the staff and patients outside. Then they had to remove their clothes in winter weather. It was the latest assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital. Parts of it were set on fire. Staff say it has been hit multiple times in the past three months by Israeli troops waging an offensive against Hamas fighters in surrounding neighborhoods. Israel's military says Hamas uses the hospital as a base. It did not provide evidence, and hospital officials have denied it. Azerbaijani and U.S. officials suggest plane that crashed may have been hit by weapons fire U.S. and Azerbaijani officials have said weapons fire may have brought down an Azerbaijani airliner that crashed on Wednesday, killing 38 people. The statements from Rashad Nabiyev and White House national security spokesman John Kirby on Friday raised pressure on Russia. Officials in Moscow have said a drone attack was underway in the region that the Azerbaijan Airlines flight was destined for but have not addressed statements from aviation experts who blamed the crash on Russian air defenses responding to a Ukrainian attack. The plane was flying from Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku to Chechnya on Wednesday when it crashed, killing 38 people and leaving all 29 survivors injured. Court rules Georgia lawmakers can subpoena Fani Willis for information related to her Trump case ATLANTA (AP) — A judge has ruled that the Georgia state Senate can subpoena Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. It's part of a inquiry into whether Willis has engaged in misconduct during her prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump. But Fulton County Superior Court Judge Shukura Ingram is giving Willis the chance to contest whether lawmakers’ demands are overly broad before Willis responds. A Republican-led committee was formed earlier this year and sent subpoenas to Willis in August seeking to compel her to testify during its September meeting and to produce scores of documents. Willis argued that the committee didn’t have the power to subpoena her. US homelessness up 18% as affordable housing remains out of reach for many people Federal officials say the United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness, a dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said that federally required tallies taken across the country in January found that more than 770,000 people were counted as homeless. That increase comes on top of a 12% increase in 2023, which HUD blamed on soaring rents and the end of pandemic assistance. Among the most concerning trends was a nearly 40% rise in family homelessness. In states that ban abortion, social safety net programs often fail families MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee has a nearly total abortion ban and a porous safety net for mothers and young children. GOP state leaders in Tennessee and other states that banned abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 argue that they are bolstering services for families. Recent research and an analysis by The Associated Press has found that from the time a Tennessee woman gets pregnant, she faces greater obstacles to a healthy pregnancy, a healthy child and a financially stable family life than the average American mom. What Snoop wants: Arizona Bowl gives NIL opportunities to players for Colorado State, Miami (Ohio) TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — When Snoop Dogg agreed to become the sponsor of the Arizona Bowl, he had a demand: It must have a NIL component. Other bowls have provided NIL chances for single players the past few years, but the Arizona Bowl is believed to be the first to offer NIL compensation to every player on both Colorado State and Miami (Ohio). The players participated in youth clinics before Saturday's game and will be compensated for their time. Alex Ovechkin is on track to break Wayne Gretzky's NHL career goals record Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals is chasing the NHL career goals record of 894 held by Wayne Gretzky. Ovechkin entered the season 42 goals short of breaking a record that long seemed unapproachable. He is set to play again Saturday at the Toronto Maple Leafs after missing more than a month with a broken left fibula. Ovechkin was on pace to get to 895 sometime in February before getting injured. At 868, he his 27 goals away from passing Gretzky.After Trump's Project 2025 denials, he is tapping its authors and influencers for key rolesHow insider trading data helps navigate market volatility

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hilosopher Shannon Vallor and I are in the British Library in London, home to 170 million items—books, recordings, newspapers, manuscripts, maps. In other words, we’re talking in the kind of place where today’s artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT come to feed. Sitting on the library’s café balcony, we are literally in the shadow of the Crick Institute, the biomedical research hub where the innermost mechanisms of the human body are studied. If we were to throw a stone from here across St. Pancras railway station, we might hit the London headquarters of Google, the company for which Vallor worked as an AI ethicist before moving to Scotland to head the Center for Technomoral Futures at the University of Edinburgh. Here, wedged between the mysteries of the human, the embedded cognitive riches of human language, and the brash swagger of commercial AI, Vallor is helping me make sense of it all. Will AI solve all our problems, or will it make us obsolete, perhaps to the point of extinction? Both possibilities have engendered hyperventilating headlines. Vallor has little time for either. She acknowledges the tremendous potential of AI to be both beneficial and destructive, but she thinks the real danger lies elsewhere. As she explains in her 2024 book , both the starry-eyed notion that AI thinks like us and the paranoid fantasy that it will manifest as a malevolent dictator, assert a fictitious kinship with humans at the cost of creating a naïve and toxic view of how our own minds work. It’s a view that could encourage us to relinquish our agency and forego our wisdom in deference to the machines. It’s easy to assert kinship between machines and humans when humans are seen as mindless machines. Reading I was struck by Vallor’s determination to probe more deeply than the usual litany of concerns about AI: privacy, misinformation, and so forth. Her book is really a discourse on the relation of human and machine, raising the alarm on how the tech industry propagates a debased version of what we are, one that reimagines the human in the guise of a soft, wet computer. If that sounds dour, Vallor most certainly isn’t. She wears lightly the deep insight gained from seeing the industry from the inside, coupled to a grounding in the philosophy of science and technology. She is no crusader against the commerce of AI, speaking warmly of her time at Google while laughing at some of the absurdities of Silicon Valley. But the moral and intellectual clarity and integrity she brings to the issues could hardly offer a greater contrast to the superficial, callow swagger typical of the proverbial tech bros. “We’re at a moment in history when we need to rebuild our confidence in the capabilities of humans to reason wisely, to make collective decisions,” Vallor tells me. “We’re not going to deal with the climate emergency or the fracturing of the foundations of democracy unless we can reassert a confidence in human thinking and judgment. And everything in the AI world is working against that.” To understand AI algorithms, Vallor argues we should not regard them as minds. “We’ve been trained over a century by science fiction and cultural visions of AI to expect that when it arrives, it’s going to be a machine mind,” she tells me. “But what we have is something quite different in nature, structure, and function.” Rather, we should imagine AI as a mirror, which doesn’t duplicate the thing it reflects. “When you go into the bathroom to brush your teeth, you know there isn’t a second face looking back at you,” Vallor says. “That’s just a reflection of a face, and it has very different properties. It doesn’t have warmth; it doesn’t have depth.” Similarly, a reflection of a mind is not a mind. AI chatbots and image generators based on large language models are of human performance. “With ChatGPT, the output you see is a reflection of human intelligence, our creative preferences, our coding expertise, our voices—whatever we put in.” Even experts, Vallor says, get fooled inside this hall of mirrors. Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for his pioneering work in developing the deep-learning techniques that made LLMs possible, at an AI conference in 2024 that “we understand language in much the same way as these large language models.” Hinton is convinced these forms of AI don’t just blindly regurgitate text in patterns that seem meaningful to us; they develop some sense of the meaning of words and concepts themselves. An LLM is trained by allowing it to adjust the connections in its neural network until it reliably gives good answers, a process that Hinton to “parenting for a supernaturally precocious child.” But because AI can “know” vastly more than we can, and “thinks” much faster, Hinton concludes that it might ultimately supplant us: “It’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence,” at a 2023 MIT Technology Review conference. “Hinton is so far out over his skis when he starts talking about knowledge and experience,” Vallor says. “We know that the are only superficially analogous in their structure and function. In terms of what’s happening at the physical level, there’s a gulf of difference that we have every reason to think makes a difference.” There’s no real kinship at all. I agree that apocalyptic claims have been given far too much airtime, I say to Vallor. But some researchers say LLMs are getting more “cognitive”: OpenAI’s latest chatbot, model o1, is said to work via a series of chain-of-reason steps (even though the company won’t disclose them, so we can’t know if they resemble human reasoning). And AI surely does have features that can be considered aspects of mind, such as memory and learning. Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell and complexity theorist r have that, while we shouldn’t regard these systems as minds like ours, they might be considered minds of a quite different, unfamiliar variety. “I’m quite skeptical about that approach. It might be appropriate in the future, and I’m not opposed in principle to the idea that we might build machine minds. I just don’t think that’s what we’re doing right now.” Vallor’s resistance to the idea of stems from her background in philosophy, where mindedness tends to be rooted in experience: precisely what today’s AI does not have. As a result, she says, it isn’t appropriate to speak of these machines as thinking. Her view collides with the 1950 paper by British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing, “Computing machinery and Intelligence,” often regarded as the conceptual foundation of AI. Turing asked the question: “Can machines think?”—only to replace it with what he considered to be a better question, which was whether we might develop machines that could give responses to questions we’d be unable to distinguish from those of humans. This was Turing’s “ ,” now commonly known as the Turing test. But imitation is all it is, Vallor says. “For me, thinking is a specific and rather unique set of experiences we have. Thinking without experience is like water without the hydrogen—you’ve taken something out that loses its identity.” Reasoning requires concepts, Vallor says, and LLMs don’t those. “Whatever we’re calling concepts in an LLM are actually something different. It’s a statistical mapping of associations in a high-dimensional mathematical vector space. Through this representation, the model can get a line of sight to the solution that is more efficient than a random search. But that’s not how we think.” They are, however, very good at . “We can ask the model, ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’ and it just bullshits a whole chain of thought that, if you press on it, will collapse into nonsense very quickly. That tells you that it wasn’t a train of thought that the machine followed and is committed to. It’s just another probabilistic distribution of reason-like shapes that are appropriately matched with the output that it generated. It’s entirely post hoc.” The pitfall of insisting on a fictitious kinship between the human mind and the machine can be discerned since the earliest days of AI in the 1950s. And here’s what worries me most about it, I tell Vallor. It’s not so much because the capabilities of the AI systems are being overestimated in the comparison, but because the way the human brain works is being so diminished by it. “That’s my biggest concern,” she agrees. Every time she gives a talk pointing out that AI algorithms are not really minds, Vallor says, “I’ll have someone in the audience come up to me and say, ‘Well, you’re right but only because at the end of the day our minds aren’t doing these things either—we’re not really rational, we’re not really responsible for what we believe, we’re just predictive machines spitting out the words that people expect, we’re just matching patterns, we’re just doing what an LLM is doing.’” Hinton has suggested an LLM can have feelings. “Maybe not exactly as we do but in a slightly different sense,” Vallor says. “And then you realize he’s only done that by stripping the concept of emotion from anything that is humanly experienced and turning it into a behaviorist reaction. It’s taking the most reductive 20th-century theories of the human mind as baseline truth. From there it becomes very easy to assert kinship between machines and humans because you’ve already turned the human into a mindless machine.” It’s with the much-vaunted notion of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that these problems start to become acute. AGI is often defined as a machine intelligence that can perform any intelligent function that humans can, but better. Some believe we are already on that threshold. Except that, to make such claims, we must redefine human intelligence as a subset of what we do. “Yes, and that’s a very deliberate strategy to draw attention away from the fact that we haven’t made AGI and we’re nowhere near it,” Vallor says. Silicon Valley culture has the features of religion. It’s unshakeable by counterevidence or argument. Originally, AGI meant something that misses nothing of what a human mind could do—something about which we’d have no doubt that it is thinking and understanding the world. But in , Vallor explains that experts such as Hinton and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, now define AGI as a system that is equal to or better than humans at calculation, prediction, modeling, production, and problem-solving. “In effect,” Vallor says, Altman “moved the goalposts and said that what we mean by AGI is a machine that can in effect do all of the economically valuable tasks that humans do.” It’s a common view in the community. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, has written the ultimate objective of AI is to “distill the essence of what makes us humans so productive and capable into software, into an algorithm,” which he considers equivalent to being able to “replicate the very thing that makes us unique as a species, our intelligence.” When she saw Altman’s reframing of AGI, Vallor says, “I had to shut the laptop and stare into space for half an hour. Now all we have for the target of AGI is something that your boss can replace you with. It can be as mindless as a toaster, as long as it can do your work. And that’s what LLMs are—they are mindless toasters that do a lot of cognitive labor without thinking.” I probe this point with Vallor. After all, having AIs that can beat us at chess is one thing—but now we have algorithms that write convincing prose, have engaging chats, make music that fools some into thinking it was made by humans. Sure, these systems can be rather limited and bland—but aren’t they encroaching ever more on tasks we might view as uniquely human? “That’s where the mirror metaphor becomes helpful,” she says. “A mirror image can dance. A good enough mirror can show you the aspects of yourself that are deeply human, but not the inner experience of them—just the performance.” With AI art, she adds, “The important thing is to realize there’s nothing on the other side participating in this communication.” What confuses us is we can feel emotions in response to an AI-generated “work of art.” But this isn’t surprising because the machine is reflecting back permutations of the patterns that humans have made: Chopin-like music, Shakespeare-like prose. And the emotional response isn’t somehow encoded in the stimulus but is constructed in our own minds: Engagement with art is far less passive than we tend to imagine. But it’s not just about art. “We are meaning-makers and meaning-inventors, and that’s partly what gives us our personal, creative, political freedoms,” Vallor says. “We’re not locked into the patterns we’ve ingested but can rearrange them in new shapes. We do that when we assert new moral claims in the world. But these machines just recirculate the same patterns and shapes with slight statistical variations. They do not have the capacity to make meaning. That’s fundamentally the gulf that prevents us being justified in claiming real kinship with them.” I ask Vallor whether some of these misconceptions and misdirection about AI are rooted in the nature of the tech community itself—in its narrowness of training and culture, its lack of diversity. She sighs. “Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of my life and having worked in tech, I can tell you the influence of that culture is profound, and it’s not just a particular cultural outlook, . There are certain commitments in that way of thinking that are unshakeable by any kind of counterevidence or argument.” In fact, providing counterevidence just gets you excluded from the conversation, Vallor says. “It’s a very narrow conception of what intelligence is, driven by a very narrow profile of values where efficiency and a kind of winner-takes-all domination are the highest values of any intelligent creature to pursue.” But this efficiency, Vallor continues, “is never defined with any reference to any higher value, which always slays me. Because I could be the most efficient at burning down every house on the planet, and no one would say, ‘Yay Shannon, you are the most efficient pyromaniac we have ever seen! Good on you!’” People really think the sun is setting on human decision-making. That’s terrifying to me. In Silicon Valley, efficiency is an end in itself. “It’s about achieving a situation where the problem is solved and there’s no more friction, no more ambiguity, nothing left unsaid or undone, you’ve dominated the problem and it’s gone and all there is left is your perfect shining solution. It is this ideology of intelligence as a thing that wants to remove the business of thinking.” Vallor tells me she once tried to explain to an AGI leader that there’s no mathematical solution to the problem of justice. “I told him the nature of justice is we have conflicting values and interests that cannot be made commensurable on a single scale, and that the work of human deliberation and negotiation and appeal is essential. And he told me, ‘I think that just means you’re bad at math.’ What do you say to that? It becomes two worldviews that don’t intersect. You’re speaking to two very different conceptions of reality.” Vallor doesn’t underestimate the threats that ever-more powerful AI presents to our societies, from our privacy to misinformation and political stability. But her real worry right now is what AI is doing to our notion of ourselves. “I think AI is posing a fairly imminent threat to the existential significance of human life,” Vallor says. “Through its automation of our thinking practices, and through the narrative that’s being created around it, AI is undermining our sense of ourselves as responsible and free intelligences in the world. You can find that in authoritarian rhetoric that wishes to justify the deprivation of humans to govern themselves. That story has had new life breathed into it by AI.” Worse, she says, this narrative is presented as an objective, neutral, politically detached story: It’s just . “You get these people who really think that the time of human agency has ended, the sun is setting on human decision-making—and that that’s a good thing and is simply scientific fact. That’s terrifying to me. We’re told that what’s next is that AGI is going to build something better. And I do think you have very cynical people who believe this is true and are taking a kind of religious comfort in the belief that they are shepherding into existence our machine successors.” Vallor doesn’t want AI to come to a halt. She says it really could help to solve some of the serious problems we face. “There are still huge applications of AI in medicine, in the energy sector, in agriculture. I want it to continue to advance in ways that are wisely selected and steered and governed.” That’s why a backlash against it, however understandable, could be a problem in the long run. “I see lots of people turning against AI,” Vallor says. “It’s becoming a powerful hatred in many creative circles. Those communities were much more balanced in their attitudes about three years ago, when LLMs and image models started coming out. There were a lot of people saying, ‘This is kind of cool.’ But the approach by the AI industry to the rights and agency of creators has been so exploitative that you now see creatives saying, ‘Fuck AI and everyone attached to it, don’t let it anywhere near our creative work.’ I worry about this reactive attitude to the most harmful forms of AI spreading to a general distrust of it as a path to solving any kind of problem.” While Vallor still wants to promote AI, “I find myself very often in the camp of the people who are turning angrily against it for reasons that are entirely legitimate,” she says. That divide, she admits, becomes part of an “artificial separation people often cling to between humanity and technology.” Such a distinction, she says, “is potentially quite damaging, because technology is fundamental to our identity. We’ve been technological creatures since before we were . Tools have been instruments of our liberation, of creation, of better ways of caring for one another and other life on this planet, and I don’t want to let that go, to enforce this artificial divide of humanity versus the machines. Technology at its core can be as humane an activity as anything can be. We’ve just lost that connection.” Posted on Philip Ball is a freelance writer based in London, and the author of many books on science and its interactions with the broader culture. His latest book is . Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers.

Pittsburgh quarterback Eli Holstein was carted off the field with 5:32 left in the first quarter with an apparent left ankle injury during Saturday's Atlantic Coast Conference game against host Louisville. The freshman was sacked at the Panthers' 49-yard line by Louisville's Ashton Gillotte, who rolled on the quarterback's ankle. Holstein was in a walking boot as he was helped to the cart. Holstein missed last week's game against Clemson after suffering a head injury in the loss to Virginia two weeks ago. Holstein was 3-for-5 passing for 51 yards and an interception before exiting. Nate Yarnell, who threw for 350 yards in the loss to Clemson, replaced Holstein. --Field Level Media

By BILL BARROW, Associated Press PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Newly married and sworn as a Naval officer, Jimmy Carter left his tiny hometown in 1946 hoping to climb the ranks and see the world. Less than a decade later, the death of his father and namesake, a merchant farmer and local politician who went by “Mr. Earl,” prompted the submariner and his wife, Rosalynn, to return to the rural life of Plains, Georgia, they thought they’d escaped. The lieutenant never would be an admiral. Instead, he became commander in chief. Years after his presidency ended in humbling defeat, he would add a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded not for his White House accomplishments but “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The life of James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th and longest-lived U.S. president, ended Sunday at the age of 100 where it began: Plains, the town of 600 that fueled his political rise, welcomed him after his fall and sustained him during 40 years of service that redefined what it means to be a former president. With the stubborn confidence of an engineer and an optimism rooted in his Baptist faith, Carter described his motivations in politics and beyond in the same way: an almost missionary zeal to solve problems and improve lives. Carter was raised amid racism, abject poverty and hard rural living — realities that shaped both his deliberate politics and emphasis on human rights. “He always felt a responsibility to help people,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend of Carter’s in Plains. “And when he couldn’t make change wherever he was, he decided he had to go higher.” Carter’s path, a mix of happenstance and calculation , pitted moral imperatives against political pragmatism; and it defied typical labels of American politics, especially caricatures of one-term presidents as failures. “We shouldn’t judge presidents by how popular they are in their day. That’s a very narrow way of assessing them,” Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Associated Press. “We should judge them by how they changed the country and the world for the better. On that score, Jimmy Carter is not in the first rank of American presidents, but he stands up quite well.” Later in life, Carter conceded that many Americans, even those too young to remember his tenure, judged him ineffective for failing to contain inflation or interest rates, end the energy crisis or quickly bring home American hostages in Iran. He gained admirers instead for his work at The Carter Center — advocating globally for public health, human rights and democracy since 1982 — and the decades he and Rosalynn wore hardhats and swung hammers with Habitat for Humanity. Yet the common view that he was better after the Oval Office than in it annoyed Carter, and his allies relished him living long enough to see historians reassess his presidency. “He doesn’t quite fit in today’s terms” of a left-right, red-blue scoreboard, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the former president multiple times during his own White House bid. At various points in his political career, Carter labeled himself “progressive” or “conservative” — sometimes both at once. His most ambitious health care bill failed — perhaps one of his biggest legislative disappointments — because it didn’t go far enough to suit liberals. Republicans, especially after his 1980 defeat, cast him as a left-wing cartoon. It would be easiest to classify Carter as a centrist, Buttigieg said, “but there’s also something radical about the depth of his commitment to looking after those who are left out of society and out of the economy.” Indeed, Carter’s legacy is stitched with complexities, contradictions and evolutions — personal and political. The self-styled peacemaker was a war-trained Naval Academy graduate who promised Democratic challenger Ted Kennedy that he’d “kick his ass.” But he campaigned with a call to treat everyone with “respect and compassion and with love.” Carter vowed to restore America’s virtue after the shame of Vietnam and Watergate, and his technocratic, good-government approach didn’t suit Republicans who tagged government itself as the problem. It also sometimes put Carter at odds with fellow Democrats. The result still was a notable legislative record, with wins on the environment, education, and mental health care. He dramatically expanded federally protected lands, began deregulating air travel, railroads and trucking, and he put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. As a fiscal hawk, Carter added a relative pittance to the national debt, unlike successors from both parties. Carter nonetheless struggled to make his achievements resonate with the electorate he charmed in 1976. Quoting Bob Dylan and grinning enthusiastically, he had promised voters he would “never tell a lie.” Once in Washington, though, he led like a joyless engineer, insisting his ideas would become reality and he’d be rewarded politically if only he could convince enough people with facts and logic. This served him well at Camp David, where he brokered peace between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Epypt’s Anwar Sadat, an experience that later sparked the idea of The Carter Center in Atlanta. Carter’s tenacity helped the center grow to a global force that monitored elections across five continents, enabled his freelance diplomacy and sent public health experts across the developing world. The center’s wins were personal for Carter, who hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite, and nearly did. As president, though, the approach fell short when he urged consumers beleaguered by energy costs to turn down their thermostats. Or when he tried to be the nation’s cheerleader, beseeching Americans to overcome a collective “crisis of confidence.” Republican Ronald Reagan exploited Carter’s lecturing tone with a belittling quip in their lone 1980 debate. “There you go again,” the former Hollywood actor said in response to a wonky answer from the sitting president. “The Great Communicator” outpaced Carter in all but six states. Carter later suggested he “tried to do too much, too soon” and mused that he was incompatible with Washington culture: media figures, lobbyists and Georgetown social elites who looked down on the Georgians and their inner circle as “country come to town.” Carter carefully navigated divides on race and class on his way to the Oval Office. Born Oct. 1, 1924 , Carter was raised in the mostly Black community of Archery, just outside Plains, by a progressive mother and white supremacist father. Their home had no running water or electricity but the future president still grew up with the relative advantages of a locally prominent, land-owning family in a system of Jim Crow segregation. He wrote of President Franklin Roosevelt’s towering presence and his family’s Democratic Party roots, but his father soured on FDR, and Jimmy Carter never campaigned or governed as a New Deal liberal. He offered himself as a small-town peanut farmer with an understated style, carrying his own luggage, bunking with supporters during his first presidential campaign and always using his nickname. And he began his political career in a whites-only Democratic Party. As private citizens, he and Rosalynn supported integration as early as the 1950s and believed it inevitable. Carter refused to join the White Citizens Council in Plains and spoke out in his Baptist church against denying Black people access to worship services. “This is not my house; this is not your house,” he said in a churchwide meeting, reminding fellow parishioners their sanctuary belonged to God. Yet as the appointed chairman of Sumter County schools he never pushed to desegregate, thinking it impractical after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision. And while presidential candidate Carter would hail the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson when Carter was a state senator, there is no record of Carter publicly supporting it at the time. Carter overcame a ballot-stuffing opponent to win his legislative seat, then lost the 1966 governor’s race to an arch-segregationist. He won four years later by avoiding explicit mentions of race and campaigning to the right of his rival, who he mocked as “Cufflinks Carl” — the insult of an ascendant politician who never saw himself as part the establishment. Carter’s rural and small-town coalition in 1970 would match any victorious Republican electoral map in 2024. Once elected, though, Carter shocked his white conservative supporters — and landed on the cover of Time magazine — by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Before making the jump to Washington, Carter befriended the family of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whom he’d never sought out as he eyed the governor’s office. Carter lamented his foot-dragging on school integration as a “mistake.” But he also met, conspicuously, with Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George Wallace to accept his primary rival’s endorsement ahead of the 1976 Democratic convention. “He very shrewdly took advantage of his own Southerness,” said Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor and expert on Carter’s campaigns. A coalition of Black voters and white moderate Democrats ultimately made Carter the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South. Then, just as he did in Georgia, he used his power in office to appoint more non-whites than all his predecessors had, combined. He once acknowledged “the secret shame” of white Americans who didn’t fight segregation. But he also told Alter that doing more would have sacrificed his political viability – and thus everything he accomplished in office and after. King’s daughter, Bernice King, described Carter as wisely “strategic” in winning higher offices to enact change. “He was a leader of conscience,” she said in an interview. Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19 at the age of 96, was identified by both husband and wife as the “more political” of the pair; she sat in on Cabinet meetings and urged him to postpone certain priorities, like pressing the Senate to relinquish control of the Panama Canal. “Let that go until the second term,” she would sometimes say. The president, recalled her former aide Kathy Cade, retorted that he was “going to do what’s right” even if “it might cut short the time I have.” Rosalynn held firm, Cade said: “She’d remind him you have to win to govern.” Carter also was the first president to appoint multiple women as Cabinet officers. Yet by his own telling, his career sprouted from chauvinism in the Carters’ early marriage: He did not consult Rosalynn when deciding to move back to Plains in 1953 or before launching his state Senate bid a decade later. Many years later, he called it “inconceivable” that he didn’t confer with the woman he described as his “full partner,” at home, in government and at The Carter Center. “We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn Carter told AP in 2021. So deep was their trust that when Carter remained tethered to the White House in 1980 as 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, it was Rosalynn who campaigned on her husband’s behalf. “I just loved it,” she said, despite the bitterness of defeat. Fair or not, the label of a disastrous presidency had leading Democrats keep their distance, at least publicly, for many years, but Carter managed to remain relevant, writing books and weighing in on societal challenges. He lamented widening wealth gaps and the influence of money in politics. He voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later declared that America had devolved from fully functioning democracy to “oligarchy.” Yet looking ahead to 2020, with Sanders running again, Carter warned Democrats not to “move to a very liberal program,” lest they help re-elect President Donald Trump. Carter scolded the Republican for his serial lies and threats to democracy, and chided the U.S. establishment for misunderstanding Trump’s populist appeal. He delighted in yearly convocations with Emory University freshmen, often asking them to guess how much he’d raised in his two general election campaigns. “Zero,” he’d gesture with a smile, explaining the public financing system candidates now avoid so they can raise billions. Carter still remained quite practical in partnering with wealthy corporations and foundations to advance Carter Center programs. Carter recognized that economic woes and the Iran crisis doomed his presidency, but offered no apologies for appointing Paul Volcker as the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate hikes would not curb inflation until Reagan’s presidency. He was proud of getting all the hostages home without starting a shooting war, even though Tehran would not free them until Reagan’s Inauguration Day. “Carter didn’t look at it” as a failure, Alter emphasized. “He said, ‘They came home safely.’ And that’s what he wanted.” Well into their 90s, the Carters greeted visitors at Plains’ Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday School and where he will have his last funeral before being buried on family property alongside Rosalynn . Carter, who made the congregation’s collection plates in his woodworking shop, still garnered headlines there, calling for women’s rights within religious institutions, many of which, he said, “subjugate” women in church and society. Carter was not one to dwell on regrets. “I am at peace with the accomplishments, regret the unrealized goals and utilize my former political position to enhance everything we do,” he wrote around his 90th birthday. The politician who had supposedly hated Washington politics also enjoyed hosting Democratic presidential contenders as public pilgrimages to Plains became advantageous again. Carter sat with Buttigieg for the final time March 1, 2020, hours before the Indiana mayor ended his campaign and endorsed eventual winner Joe Biden. “He asked me how I thought the campaign was going,” Buttigieg said, recalling that Carter flashed his signature grin and nodded along as the young candidate, born a year after Carter left office, “put the best face” on the walloping he endured the day before in South Carolina. Never breaking his smile, the 95-year-old host fired back, “I think you ought to drop out.” “So matter of fact,” Buttigieg said with a laugh. “It was somehow encouraging.” Carter had lived enough, won plenty and lost enough to take the long view. “He talked a lot about coming from nowhere,” Buttigieg said, not just to attain the presidency but to leverage “all of the instruments you have in life” and “make the world more peaceful.” In his farewell address as president, Carter said as much to the country that had embraced and rejected him. “The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language,” he declared. “Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity and who suffer for the sake of justice — they are the patriots of this cause.” Carter pledged to remain engaged with and for them as he returned “home to the South where I was born and raised,” home to Plains, where that young lieutenant had indeed become “a fellow citizen of the world.” —- Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.

By MARY CLARE JALONICK and MATT BROWN WASHINGTON (AP) — Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Defense Department, said he had a “wonderful conversation” with Maine Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday as he pushed to win enough votes for confirmation. He said he will not back down after allegations of excessive drinking and sexual misconduct. Related Articles National Politics | Donald Trump will ring the New York Stock Exchange bell. It’ll be a first for him National Politics | The Trump and Biden teams insist they’re working hand in glove on foreign crises National Politics | ‘You don’t know what’s next.’ International students scramble ahead of Trump inauguration National Politics | Trump is threatening to raise tariffs again. Here’s how China plans to fight back National Politics | Trump won’t be able to save the struggling US beef industry Collins said after the hourlong meeting that she questioned Hegseth about the allegations amid reports of drinking and the revelation that he made a settlement payment after being accused of a sexual assault that he denies. She said she had a “good, substantive” discussion with Hegseth and “covered a wide range of topics,” including sexual assault in the military, Ukraine and NATO. But she said she would wait until a hearing, and notably a background check, to make a decision. “I asked virtually every question under the sun,” Collins told reporters as she left her office after the meeting. “I pressed him both on his position on military issues as well as the allegations against him, so I don’t think there was anything that we did not cover.” The meeting with Collins was closely watched as she is seen as more likely than most of her Republican Senate colleagues to vote against some of Trump’s Cabinet picks. She and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a fellow moderate Republican, did not shy from opposing Trump in his first term when they wanted to do so and sometimes supported President Joe Biden’s nominees for the judicial and executive branches. And Hegseth, an infantry combat veteran and former “Fox & Friends” weekend host, is working to gain as many votes as he can as some senators have expressed concerns about his personal history and lack of management experience. “I’m certainly not going to assume anything about where the senator stands,” Hegseth said as he left Collins’ office. “This is a process that we respect and appreciate. And we hope, in time, overall, when we get through that committee and to the floor that we can earn her support.” Hegseth met with Murkowski on Tuesday. He has also been meeting repeatedly with Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, a military veteran who has said she is a survivor of sexual assault and has spent time in the Senate working on improving how attacks are reported and prosecuted within the ranks. On Monday, Ernst said after a meeting with him that he had committed to selecting a senior official to prioritize those goals. Republicans will have a 53-49 majority next year, meaning Trump cannot lose more than three votes on any of his nominees. It is so far unclear whether Hegseth will have enough support, but Trump has stepped up his pressure on senators in the last week. “Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!” Trump posted on his social media platform last week.Who Is Katie Maloney's Boyfriend, Nick Martin? Here's What We Know

The penultimate week of the 2024 NFL regular season was... . Christmas gave way to a new day for the league to monetize and spread 16 games across five days. Typically, that would be exciting news -- especially with a handful of games between contenders destined to alter the 14 postseason paths to Super Bowl 59. Instead, we got blowouts and bad football. The Kansas City Chiefs rolled the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Houston Texans scored two total points against the Baltimore Ravens. The Seattle Seahawks and Chicago Bears combined for nine points. While Saturday's Cincinnati Bengals - Denver Broncos was a fireworks display unto itself, the majority of Week 17 was uncompelling football. Even Sunday's marquee game between the Minnesota Vikings and Green Bay Packers was a listless slog before Green Bay made a late rally in a 27-25 loss. So what stood out in a week of forgettable matchups? Let's talk about it. [Please bear with me for any Twitter embed issues. Our editing software has become a whole problem on that front the past couple weeks. Rest assured, if there’s a play alluded to in the text it’s worth clicking through to see if it didn’t make it into the article itself.] The Jets' 40-14 loss was somehow worse than the final score suggests. It all starts with the veteran quarterback whose body language is bleeding through an undisciplined team that's crumbled around him. From : The Jets cannot allow Aaron Rodgers to return Jackson embarrassed the Houston Texans 31-2 and had 255 total yards and three touchdowns on just 19 touches (15 passes, four carries). That puts him at 43 touchdowns on the year -- as many or more than he had in either of his two previous MVP campaigns. ACTION JACKSON TO THE HOUSE!!! Tune in on Netflix!! — Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) Barkley became just the ninth running back to break the 2,000 rushing yard barrier in a single NFL season. He's 100 yards away from tying Eric Dickerson's record of 2,105. SAQUON BARKLEY. 2K RUSHING YARDS. — NFL (@NFL) All four of these players have a valid claim for most valuable player. Ultimately, this year's quarterback play may have been too good for even a historic season from Barkley to break through. And as good as Burrow has been, it will be incredibly difficult to sway voters on a team with a single-digit chance of making the playoffs this winter. That leaves it down to Allen and Jackson -- an argument in which neither side is wrong. For me, Allen's ability to stave off what looked like a rebuild and continue to thrive despite an underwhelming receiving corps is enough to give him the nod for my PFWA vote. But I still have time to change my mind and plenty of tape left to grind. No matter who I choose, however, I'm gonna be OK with the outcome. Facing fourth-and-one near midfield typically means one thing for the Eagles. A compressed formation, a snap under center and a rugby-style push for first down. In 2023, Philadelphia's 73 percent fourth down conversion rate was nearly seven full points higher than second place Tampa Bay. But in Week 17, head coach Nick Sirianni stared down fourth-and-one at his own 46 in need of a win to keep pace in his race for the NFC's top seed and a playoff bye. Then he blinked. Out came punter Braden Mann for a kick that bounced into the end zone for a touchback. This wasn't the only indication the Eagles were playing without Jalen Hurts behind center. If we're being honest, this was the dead giveaway: But Kenny Pickett's act of premium mime-ery -- THE MAN -- barely made a dent in Philadelphia's win probability against the Dallas Cowboys. Not even Pickett's third quarter departure due to a rib injury could slow this offense down. 2023 sixth-round draft pick Tanner McKee entered the game, threw four passes and found the end zone twice. BABE WAKE UP! IT'S TANNER TIME ⏰ | | — Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) One week after Hurts's head injury created the latitude for the Washington Commanders McKee and Pickett led a charge that locked the Commanders out of the NFC East title race and ensured, at the very least, a home playoff game in Pennsylvania. How? Thanks to the rising tide around the quarterback position and an overwhelmed opponent. The defense that had gotten sliced up by Olamide Zaccheaus and Jamison Crowder in the fourth quarter of last week's collapse shoved Cooper Rush into a locker. Without CeeDee Lamb in the lineup, the Cowboys offense averaged just 5.2 yards per pass attempt. The secondary held Rush to a piddling 50.7 passer rating. The offense also showcased its star power. DeVonta Smith had two touchdowns and nearly a third thanks to Pickett dialing it back to his Pittsburgh Steelers days and delivering three good passes per game. A.J. Brown found the end zone. Saquon Barkley ran for 167 yards, putting him just 100 away from . The offense didn't need a heroic effort to put up 40-plus points, it just needed someone who could operate within the narrow confines of a smaller playbook and get the ball to the guys who can do the most with it. That's what Pickett and McKee did, even if that meant Pickett botching a goal line Tush Push in the second half to help validate Sirianni's first quarter decision to punt (he rode a wave of blockers into the end zone one play later). It's also a reminder of how dangerous this team can be with a healthy Hurts. You don't get extra credit for rolling a shorthanded Cowboys team at home, but you can make a statement by doing so with your third-string quarterback. Philadelphia can survive a Hurts playoff slump, but it can thrive if he's back to his Week 15 self (where he carved up the Steelers for 290 passing yards and a pair of touchdowns). There's more to the Eagles' playbook than just "get the ball to Brown/Smith/Barkley," but Philly can be a real headache even when that's all a diminished quarterback has to do. In a week where cracks could have begun to show without Hurts in the lineup, that's a statement to which the rest of the NFC has to pay attention. Tampa Bay rallied to the top of the NFC South in Week 15, then ceded that position back to the Atlanta Falcons by losing to the Cooper Rush Cowboys in Week 16. Sunday's game against the Carolina Panthers wasn't quite a must-win situation, but a slip up against an upset-hungry division rival would have been brutal to the team's playoff hopes. Baker Mayfield understood this. He also knew he was up against a Panthers defense that ranked 26th in EPA allowed per dropback and dead last in pressure rate. By those powers combined, Mayfield put up a video game type performance. J Mac's 4️⃣ straight games with a TD grab is tied for the fourth-longest streak by a rookie in NFL history 🤯 📺: on CBS — Tampa Bay Buccaneers (@Buccaneers) Mayfield threw as many incomplete passes (five) as touchdowns in a 48-14 rout over a feisty Carolina team who'd knocked the Arizona Cardinals out of playoff contention a week earlier. One look at his passing chart shows how diversely he was able to grind a bad defense down to dust. This was impressive when Mayfield was putting together games like this with Mike Evans, Chris Godwin and Cade Otton in the lineup. On Sunday, he only had Evans, who had a very Mike Evans game with eight catches, 97 yards and a pair of touchdown catches from short range. Behind him, the following players all had at least 36 receiving yards: Bucky Irving Devin Culp Jalen McMillan Payne Durham The connective tissue between them is Mayfield's reads and placement. But as good as Sunday's performance was -- and no matter how you slice it, 359 yards and five passing touchdowns without a turnover is AWESOME -- there remains room for concern. There's skill involved in throws like these, but the degree of difficulty was undeniably low. 6️⃣ & 1️⃣5️⃣ back at it again 🙌 📺: on CBS — Tampa Bay Buccaneers (@Buccaneers) The Panthers' inability to rustle Mayfield was the source of their pain. Mayfield has been effective against the blitz because of pickups like the one seen above -- his passer rating actually when defenses bring an extra attacker, even if his EPA/snap drops thanks to more sacks taken. His strength is his vision, and when that newfound pass rusher enters the fray he's able to identify where it's coming from, the hole it leaves and the single coverage opportunities that persist. 4️⃣ TUDDIES FOR 6️⃣ 📺: on CBS — Tampa Bay Buccaneers (@Buccaneers) If that blitz doesn't get home, it's disastrous. But if it does, it's a big deal. Mayfield's rating drops from 108.3 without pressure to 83.4 when someone breaches his pocket. His EPA/dropback falls from 0.22 to -0.27. In Week 16, the Cowboys let him throw for 303 yards but brought pressure on 36 percent of his dropbacks between a balance of blitzes and successful four-man rushes in a win. The Denver Broncos introduced pressure on 45 percent of his pass plays in Week 3 and held him to 163 passing yards on 40 dropbacks... in a win. That's not a guarantor of success -- both the Las Vegas Raiders and Detroit Lions sacked him at least four times in Tampa Bay victories -- but it's a great place to start. Mayfield thrived for several reasons Sunday, including a weak Panthers secondary. But he was able to make these easy throws and breeze to a stupefying stat line because Carolina rarely made him uncomfortable. Should the Bucs make it to the postseason, opponents will know just what to do. They've got to create pressure while mitigating the risk of Tampa's strong blitz pickups and Mayfield's ability to exploit it. That's a fine line to walk -- and one Mayfield might wind up sprinting across anyway. Week 17 was a remarkable one for rookie wide receivers. Marvin Harrison Jr. had six catches for 96 yards as the Arizona Cardinals late rally against the Los Angeles Rams fell short. Xavier Worthy had 89 total yards and a touchdown against the Steelers. Xavier Legette to the Panthers' locker room to share with reporters. But three players stood above the rest, just as they've been doing all season. Ladd McConkey, Brian Thomas Jr. and Malik Nabers each walked off their respective fields this weekend as winners -- something that's far from guaranteed when Thomas Jr. and Nabers play for the Jacksonville Jaguars and New York Giants, respectively. Each was absolutely vital to his team's effort. McConkey kicked things off Saturday, continuing an epic tradition in which wideouts the New England Patriots failed to draft rise up to torch them. HERBO 40 YARDS TO LADD 📺 | — Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers) McConkey has been an absolute animal for a Los Angeles team starved for receiving help. The second round pick is up to 1,054 receiving yards on the season thanks to his ability to break off defenders with clean routes and split double teams. He's a menace across the field whose 2.63 yards per route run (YPRR) rank ninth in the NFL among wideouts with at least 200 routes. That's one spot ahead of Ja'Marr Chase and 90 in front of Ja'Lynn Polk, the wideout New England selected after trading back and giving the Chargers the 34th overall pick (Polk, at 0.39 YPRR, is dead last among qualified WRs). Thomas Jr. has had a higher degree of difficulty. He's part of a similarly thin depth chart at wideout, but his quarterbacks this season have been a not-quite-right Trevor Lawrence and (big sigh) Mac Jones. Watch 7 work! | on CBS — Jacksonville Jaguars (@Jaguars) On Sunday he became just the fourth rookie wideout to have at least 1,100 receiving yards (he's at 1,179) and 10 touchdowns, joining Randy Moss, Ja'Marr Chase and Odell Beckham Jr. That is absurd company to keep. I've already expounded -- and how his run-after-catch ability is the perfect balm to heal a burned quarterback like Jones -- but it bears repeating. Jacksonville's search for a true alpha wideout alongside Lawrence appears to have finally found its man. While those two each have high profile quarterbacks behind them, Nabers decidedly does not. In his debut season he's caught passes from Daniel Jones, Tommy DeVito and Drew Lock. On Sunday, he helped guide Lock to the best game of his career. LEEEEK 59-yard TD 📺: FOX — New York Giants (@Giants) Lock threw for 309 yards and four touchdowns despite attempting only four passes that traveled more than 13 yards downfield. Nabers, with seven catches on eight targets, 171 yards and two touchdowns, was the primary beneficiary of his quarterback's competence and the Indianapolis Colts drastic lack thereof. It would be tempting to consider that stat and the highlight above and consider Nabers a short-range savant. This is incorrect. This Nabers catch 👀 📺: FOX — New York Giants (@Giants) Nabers came into the league with one of the most polished skill sets of any member of this rookie class. While he'd only caught three of 21 deep balls this year, that's as much a function of his weak quarterbacking as anything else. When given a chance to get to the ball, he thrives -- as evidenced by and 0.69 EPA per target when running routes between 10 and 19 yards downfield. This intermediate wizardry is a function of his overall skill set. He can win one-on-one. He can sit down in zone coverage and find holes. He can be the WR1 who allows the other wideouts in New York to fit into better defined roles, allowing Wan'Dale Robinson to be a run-after-catch wizard and allowing Darius Slayton to run the downfield routes he can exploit for big gains. All three rookies are foundational pieces for teams in dire need of playmakers. McConkey is in the best position of the three, but both Nabers and Thomas will be undeniably important to the rebuilding of their respective franchises. Time will tell which one of these players will have the best career -- for my money, it'll be Nabers if he's even given a semi-competent long-term quarterback -- but for now the Chargers, Jaguars and Giants have struck gold. The Colts had a flicker of hope coming into Week 17. They were still part of the AFC playoff race, albeit way out in the periphery thanks to an 7-8 start. Their 18 percent Wild Card odds, per The Athletic, rested on the shoulder of Joe Flacco -- the backup quarterback who'd earlier been pressed into action in place of Anthony Richardson thanks to the young passer's accuracy concerns. If Flacco and a hungry roster of homegrown players could beat the NFL's worst team, they'd keep their postseason hopes alive. That is not what Flacco and his hungry roster did. SLAYYY 👏 1 repost = 1 vote! + Slayton 📺: FOX — New York Giants (@Giants) The Colts offense without Richardson shrunk, but their defense was an abject disaster. This is a unit that's been uniquely bad in genuinely baffling ways. Indianapolis has given up more than 300 net passing yards only three times in 2024. Those came against: Trevor Lawrence and a Jaguars team that's currently 4-12 Caleb Williams and a Chicago Bears team that's currently 4-12 and Drew Lock's Giants, who are now 3-13. That's remarkable! Indianapolis held Jordan Love to 122 net passing yards early in the season but nearly gave up three times that much to Drew by-god Lock! The Colts lost two of those games, only surviving the Bears. That's not what a playoff team does, and indeed Indianapolis will not be a playoff team. New York had 10 different plays that picked up at least 12 yards. Their touchdowns came on a 100-yard kickoff return and passing plays of 31, 32 and 59 yards. This was a team that ranked in the bottom five when it came to explosive play rate, in large part because the offensive line was awful and its quarterbacks were Jones, DeVito and Lock. Yet on Sunday, facing a team who had every reason to treat Week 17 like a de facto playoff game, they feasted. This shattered the illusion the Colts could even be a modest spoiler in the postseason. General manager Chris Ballard opted to keep the band together in 2024, re-signing a bevy of free agents in hopes a healthy Anthony Richardson could bring this team back to the playoffs. But this was a terrible idea, because Richardson is neither a pass rusher or a cornerback and the holes left on that side of the ball were so huge even the New York Giants could drive their rickety jalopy through them. Sometimes, can save Jordan Love. The young quarterback turned on the jets last season as the weather grew cold and the Japanese automaker began its holiday sales push. History repeated itself in 2024 as an early injury sapped his effectiveness before he was able to rally the Packers to an 11-4 record. The only thing missing was a signature win after losses to the Philadelphia Eagles, Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings. A Week 17 rematch in Minneapolis gave him the opportunity to rectify that. Love could not. The fifth-year quarterback fell silent for the bulk of Sunday's national broadcast. He had only 54 passing yards through the first 50 minutes as Green Bay fell into a 17-point third quarter hole. The downfield passing and wide open targets had been erased by Brian Flores and a defense that threw a multitude of looks at Love's offense. He was hit or sacked on 33 percent of his dropbacks and, importantly, either didn't have or couldn't find the free runners that make the Packer offense so dangerous. Love completed just four of his 13 passes that traveled at least nine yards downfield. That's not entirely surprising -- he's completing only 10-plus yards downfield this fall -- but it's absolutely brutal for the Green Bay offense. Tucker Kraft's 35-yard catch-and-run was the team's only play that sprang for more than 19 yards. In Week 14 against the similarly impressive Detroit Lions Love's offense had six such plays. Against the Seattle Seahawks' rising defense in Week 15, it had seven if you include pass interference penalties. This is how the Packers feast or starve. Without big chunk plays, they wind up stuck in neutral for long stretches. But what's more concerning is the sudden lack of protein in their diet of victories. After falling Sunday night, Green Bay's best win is over... the Los Angeles Rams in the midst of a 1-4 start? An underwhelming Houston Texans team? The desiccated husk of the San Francisco 49ers? The Green Bay Packers are difficult to trust. They're beating the teams they're supposed to, but losing when paired up against actual contenders. Week 17 was their last chance to prove it with the safety net of the regular season as a backdrop. Their next failure against an actual contender will spell the end of their Super Bowl quest. QB: C.J. Stroud, Texans (185 passing yards, one interception, seven rushing yards, five sacks, 8.0 fantasy points) RB: James Conner, Cardinals (four rushing yards, two catches, four receiving yards, 2.8 fantasy points) RB: Rhamondre Stevenson, Patriots (one rushing yard, 0.1 fantasy points) WR: Jayden Reed, Packers (one catch, six yards, 1.6 fantasy points) WR: DeAndre Hopkins, Chiefs (two catches, seven yards, 2.7 fantasy points) WR: Cooper Kupp, Rams (one catch, 29 yards, 3.9 fantasy points) TE: Jake Ferguson, Cowboys (three catches, 18 yards, 4.8 fantasy points) D/ST: Indianapolis Colts (45 points allowed, -8.0 fantasy points) : 15.9 points

The Latest: Former President Jimmy Carter is Dead at age 100

Cam Carter scored LSU's first eight points and finished with a game-high 23 and LSU raced to a 37-8 lead on its way to a 110-45 victory against outmanned Mississippi Valley State on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La. Vyctorius Miller added 20 points and Jordan Sears and Daimion Collins scored 15 each for the Tigers (11-2), who led 55-13 at halftime. It was their final game before opening Southeastern Conference play against visiting Vanderbilt on Saturday. LSU, which defeated Mississippi Valley 106-60 last season, shot 65.7 percent (46 of 70) from the floor. The Delta Devils (2-11) had no player score in double figures. The closest was Alvin Stredic with eight points. Mississippi Valley State remained winless against Division I opponents and have an average margin of defeat of 44.2 points heading into their Southwestern Athletic Conference opener at Alabama State on Jan. 4. Stredic's field goal tied the score at two before Carter made a tie-breaking 3-pointer to give LSU the lead for good. Carter made another 3-pointer during a 7-0 run that increased the lead to 12-4. Another field goal by Stredic ended that run before Carter and Sears each made a 3-pointer and the Tigers pushed the lead to 20-6. Stredic made another field goal, giving him six of his team's first eight points, before Carter made a 3-pointer and another basket to help fuel a 17-0 run that enabled LSU to build the 37-8 bulge. Johnathan Pace made a field goal to stop the run, but Sears and Curtis Givens III each made a 3-pointer to complete a 10-0 run that expanded the lead to 47-10. Jair Horton answered with the Delta Devils' only 3-pointer of the half before Miller and Sears each scored four points and the Tigers led by 42 at the break. Carter (16 points) and Sears (10) combined to score twice as many points as Mississippi Valley State in the half. Carter made 6-of-10 3-pointers and Sears made 4 of 8. --Field Level Media

The Los Angeles Chargers activated running back J.K. Dobbins from injured reserve on Friday. Dobbins is formally listed as questionable but figures to be the team's top running threat for Saturday's road game against the New England Patriots. Teammate Gus Edwards (ankle) was ruled out Thursday. Dobbins has missed the past four games since sustaining a knee injury against the Baltimore Ravens on Nov. 25. He was a full practice participant Thursday before receiving the questionable label. The injury-prone Dobbins was enjoying a solid season prior to the knee ailment, with 766 yards and eight touchdowns on the ground and 28 receptions for 134 yards in 11 games. His career high for rushing yardage is 805 for the Ravens in 2020. Dobbins' return comes with the Chargers (9-6) just one win from clinching an AFC wild-card playoff spot. Los Angeles also elevated safeties Eddie Jackson and Kendall Williamson from the practice squad. --Field Level MediaBOSTON — Forty years ago, Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie rolled to his right and threw a pass that has become one of college football’s most iconic moments. With Boston College trailing defending champion Miami, Flutie threw the Hail Mary and found receiver Gerard Phalen, who made the grab while falling into the end zone behind a pair of defenders for a game-winning 48-yard TD. Flutie and many of his 1984 teammates were honored on the field during BC’s 41-21 victory over North Carolina before the second quarter on Saturday afternoon, the anniversary of the Eagles’ Miracle in Miami. “There’s no way its been 40 years,” Flutie told The Associated Press on the sideline a few minutes before he walked out with some of his former teammates to be recognized after a video of The Play was shown on the scoreboards. It’s a moment and highlight that’s not only played throughout decades of BC students and fans, but around the college football world. “What is really so humbling is that the kids 40 years later are wearing 22 jerseys, still,” Flutie said of his old number. “That amazes me.” That game was played on national TV the Friday after Thanksgiving. The ironic thing is it was originally scheduled for earlier in the season before CBS paid Rutgers to move its game against Miami, thus setting up the BC-Miami post-holiday matchup. “It shows you how random some things are, that the game was moved,” Flutie said. “The game got moved to the Friday after Thanksgiving, which was the most watched game of the year. We both end up being nationally ranked and up there. All those things lent to how big the game itself was, and made the pass and the catch that much more relevant and remembered because so many people were watching.” There’s a statue of Flutie winding up to make The Pass outside the north gates at Alumni Stadium. Fans and visitors can often be seen taking photos there. “In casual conversation, it comes up every day,” Flutie said, when asked how many times people bring it up. “It brings a smile to my face every time we talk about it.” A week after the game-ending Flutie pass, the Eagles beat Holy Cross and before he flew off to New York to accept the Heisman. They went on to win the 49th Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Day. Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie evades Miami defensive tackle Kevin Fagan during the first quarter of a game on Nov. 23, 1984, in Miami, Fla. JOE SKIPPER, AP File “Forty years seem almost like incomprehensible,” said Phalen, also standing on the sideline a few minutes after the game started. “I always say to Doug: ‘Thank God for social media. It’s kept it alive for us.”’ Earlier this week, current BC coach Bill O’Brien, 55, was asked if he remembered where he was 40 years ago. “We were eating Thanksgiving leftovers in my family room,” he said. “My mom was saying a Rosary in the kitchen because she didn’t like Miami and wanted BC to win. My dad, my brother and I were watching the game. “It was unbelievable,” he said. “Everybody remembers where they were for the Hail Mary, Flutie pass.” In this image taken with a slow shutter speed, Spain's tennis player Rafael Nadal serves during a training session at the Martin Carpena Sports Hall, in Malaga, southern Spain, on Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez) Manu Fernandez A fan takes a picture of the moon prior to a qualifying soccer match for the FIFA World Cup 2026 between Uruguay and Colombia in Montevideo, Uruguay, Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Santiago Mazzarovich) Santiago Mazzarovich Rasmus Højgaard of Denmark reacts after missing a shot on the 18th hole in the final round of World Tour Golf Championship in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri) Altaf Qadri Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Jalen Tolbert (1) fails to pull in a pass against Atlanta Falcons cornerback Dee Alford (20) during the second half of an NFL football game, Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/ Brynn Anderson) Brynn Anderson India's Tilak Varma jumps in the air as he celebrates after scoring a century during the third T20 International cricket match between South Africa and India, at Centurion Park in Centurion, South Africa, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Themba Hadebe Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Zach Werenski warms up before facing the Seattle Kraken in an NHL hockey game Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson) Lindsey Wasson Kansas State players run onto the field before an NCAA college football game against Arizona State Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024, in Manhattan, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) Charlie Riedel A fan rapped in an Uruguay flag arrives to the stands for a qualifying soccer match against Colombia for the FIFA World Cup 2026 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico) Matilde Campodonico Brazil's Marquinhos attempts to stop the sprinklers that were turned on during a FIFA World Cup 2026 qualifying soccer match against Venezuela at Monumental stadium in Maturin, Venezuela, Thursday, Nov. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos) Ariana Cubillos Georgia's Georges Mikautadze celebrates after scoring his side's first goal during the UEFA Nations League, group B1 soccer match between Georgia and Ukraine at the AdjaraBet Arena in Batumi, Georgia, Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Tamuna Kulumbegashvili) Tamuna Kulumbegashvili Dallas Stars center Mavrik Bourque, right, attempts to score while Minnesota Wild right wing Ryan Hartman (38) and Wild goaltender Filip Gustavsson (32) keep the puck out of the net during the second period of an NHL hockey game, Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt) Ellen Schmidt Mike Tyson, left, fights Jake Paul during their heavyweight boxing match, Friday, Nov. 15, 2024, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) Julio Cortez Italy goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario misses the third goal during the Nations League soccer match between Italy and France, at the San Siro stadium in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) Luca Bruno President-elect Donald Trump attends UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden, Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Evan Vucci Fans argue in stands during the UEFA Nations League soccer match between France and Israel at the Stade de France stadium in Saint-Denis, outside Paris, Thursday Nov. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus) Thibault Camus St. John's guard RJ Luis Jr. (12) falls after driving to the basket during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against New Mexico, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith) Pamela Smith Katie Taylor, left, lands a right to Amanda Serrano during their undisputed super lightweight title bout, Friday, Nov. 15, 2024, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) Julio Cortez Las Vegas Raiders wide receiver DJ Turner, right, tackles Miami Dolphins wide receiver Malik Washington, left, on a punt return during the second half of an NFL football game, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024, in Miami Gardens, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) Lynne Sladky UConn's Paige Bueckers (5) battles North Carolina's Laila Hull, right, for a loose ball during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game in Greensboro, N.C., Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Ben McKeown) Ben McKeown

None“I like players with character” – Ruben Amorim names the Man Utd legend he’d love at his disposal nowAndy Murray and Novak Djokovic’s magnificent seven grand slam finals