Former President Jimmy Carter Dies at 100

Happy Monday! Magnus Carlsen, a five-time world chess champion, withdrew from a major competition on Friday after he refused to change out of jeans and into something nicer. 

To be honest, even jeans seem a little too much for the week of oblivion between Christmas and the New Year. Soft pants only!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Former President Jimmy Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100, according to a statement by his son, Chip. Carter, a peanut farmer who became governor of Georgia in 1971, was elected president in 1976. Carter’s one term, however, was marked by an unsuccessful attempt to combat inflation and the Iran hostage crisis, and he was defeated by Ronald Reagan in the election of 1980. Carter had an unusually active post-presidential career, campaigning internationally for human rights and economic development and building homes with Habitat for Humanity. Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, whom he married in 1946, passed away in November 2023.
• More than 175 people died in a plane crash in Muan, South Korea, on Sunday, marking the country’s worst air disaster since 1997. The Jeju Air flight, a Boeing 737-800 arriving from Bangkok, reportedly crashed into the runway at high speed with no landing gear deployed. South Korean officials are investigating possible causes of the crash, including inclement weather and a possible bird strike in an engine.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologized to Azerbaijan for the plane crash that killed 38 people on Wednesday, claiming that air defense systems in the Russian region of Chechnya were repelling a Ukrainian drone attack at the time of the incident but stopping short of explicitly saying that Russian missiles had struck the plane. U.S. officials have said such missiles likely caused the crash of the aircraft, which was flying from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to Chechnya. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyez, in a state television interview on Sunday, accused Russia of unintentionally shooting the plane. “We can say with complete clarity that the plane was shot down by Russia,” Aliyez said. “Unfortunately, for the first three days we heard nothing from Russia except delirious versions.”
• Georgia swore in a new president on Sunday, replacing Salome Zourabichvili—an outspoken, pro-European Union critic of the governing Georgian Dream (GD) party—with Mikheil Kavelashvili, a Georgian Dream ally and a critic of aligning the eastern European country with the West. “I am taking legitimacy with me, I am taking the flag with me, I am taking your trust with me,” Zourabachvili—who has led recent protests against GD’s anti-EU moves—told supporters before leaving the presidential palace.
• Meanwhile on Friday, the U.S. State Department announced sanctions on Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili—who founded and has bankrolled Georgian Dream—accusing him of “actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad.” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller called Ivanishvili the “honorary chairman” of GD, which has in recent months violently cracked down on protesters and the opposition, and is accused by international supporters of rigging the October election. 
• The State Department on Friday designated Marc Fogel, an American teacher currently serving a 14-year prison sentence in Russia, as “wrongfully detained.” Fogel, who formerly worked at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, was arrested in August 2021 and convicted of drug smuggling. Russian authorities claim that they found cannabis oil in Fogel’s luggage at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, though Fogel’s family said he was carrying the oil to treat a spinal condition. The designation shifts responsibility for the case to the office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, and is made after the government determines that there is credible evidence that a prisoner is innocent, or is being held for primarily diplomatic or political reasons.
• White House National Security Spokesperson John Kirby said Friday that some North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia in Ukraine and in Ukrainian-held Russian territory had killed themselves to avoid capture, “likely out of fear of reprisal against their families in North Korea.” U.S. officials also said that they believe more than 1,000 North Korean troops—almost 10 percent of the troops deployed by Pyongyang to Russia—had been killed in the past week, used in “hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses” and unprepared for drone warfare. 
• President-elect Donald Trump on Friday requested that the Supreme Court pause implementation of a law that would ban the video app TikTok in the United States on January 19, asking that his administration be given time to find a resolution through “political means.” A legal brief presented by Trump’s lawyers took no position on the specific issues in the law passed by Congress earlier this year—which would ban TikTok unless it is sold by ByteDance, its Chinese parent company—but argued that a ban could set a “dangerous global precedent” for free expression. 
• An annual report released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Friday recorded an 18 percent increase in homelessness over the past year. A nationwide count in January recorded roughly 771,000 people as experiencing homelessness, including 150,000 children. The agency attributed the increase to immigration, natural disasters, and rising housing costs.
• The Israel Defense Forces reportedly used the U.S.-provided Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, for the first time on Thursday or Friday. The system was allegedly used to intercept a projectile from Yemen, fired in retaliation for Israeli strikes on the airport in Saana and other Houthi-controlled targets in Yemen. The THAAD was placed in Israel by the U.S. in October. 

Carter’s Century 

Former President Jimmy Carter passed away on Sunday afternoon at his home in Plains, Georgia, at the age of 100.

He is survived by four children, 11 grandchildren, and 14 great grandchildren. “My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” Carter’s son Chip said in a statement upon his father’s passing. 

Carter had contracted cancer and fell a handful of times as he grew older, but he generally made successful recoveries. Yet his public schedule finally began to slow in recent years, and he and his wife were unable to attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration—the first Carter missed …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,514-word item on the life of former President Jimmy Carter is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Democracy Wrapped, 2024

As 2024 draws to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on the past year, do some journaling, and make resolutions for the new year. And after a season of historic elections, we’d love to take a peek at the year-in-review journal entries of the world’s incumbent party leaders, most of whom took a shellacking at polling stations across the globe.

Billions of people voted in elections held in more than 70 countries this year. Approximately, half the world’s population had the opportunity to cast ballots in 2024, making it the biggest election year in human history. And with few exceptions, developed democracies saw a wave of …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,354-word item on elections in 2024 is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• As the Sudanese civil war approaches the two-year mark, Sudan’s young people are faced with difficult choices—including Amal Abdelazeem and her family. “To help feed the family, her 21-year-old brother, Yassin, took odd jobs,” Declan Walsh reported for the New York Times. “But that raised the suspicions of R.S.F. fighters, who beat and detained him three times, he said in an interview. Once, he escaped by ambushing an R.S.F. guard and throttling him. ‘I didn’t look back,’ he said. But another brother, Mohamed, 25, joined the R.S.F. Mohamed had always been trouble, Ms. Abdelazeem said, and in the war fell in with a group of R.S.F. fighters who roamed their neighborhood. He was assigned to an internal R.S.F. unit charged with reining in the widespread car theft that made the group unpopular, she said. Then Mohamed looted his own family’s home, she said, walking out with a fridge and a TV, brushing past his sister as she implored him to stop.”
• For Aeon magazine, Collin Jennings penned an ode to the lowly hyperlink. “Google and other websites are moving away from relying on links in favour of artificial intelligence chatbots,” he wrote. “Considered as preserved trails of connected ideas, links make sense as early victims of the AI revolution since large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others abstract the information represented online and present it in source-less summaries. We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself—the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web—is in danger of going extinct. So it’s pertinent to ask: how did links come to represent information in the first place? And what’s at stake in the movement away from links toward AI chat interfaces?” 

Presented Without Comment

The Hill: Kari Lake Says She Won’t Seek Office Again 

Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Elon Musk Accused of Censoring Conservatives on X Who Disagree With Him About Immigration

In the Zeitgeist

The oldest living survivor of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Warren Upton, died last week at 105 years old. Here’s an interview from 2021, in which he reflects on his dramatic escape from the USS Utah.

Toeing the Company Line

• Community and partnerships manager Ryan Brown answered members’ questions in December’s Monthly Mailbag. Be sure to read to learn how his job—and Sen. Mitt Romney—helped him meet his wife!
• In the newsletters: Nick Catoggio argued (🔒) that MAGA’s internal contradictions made the fight over high-skilled immigration inevitable, Jonah Goldberg made the case that Vivek Ramaswamy is wrong about American culture, and in Dispatch Faith, Daniel Kane reflected on Chabad and the murder of a rabbi in the United Arab Emirates last month.
• On the podcasts: Jonah Goldberg delighted in the latest round of MAGA infighting on The Remnant, and Michael Reneau was joined by Daniel Kane on The Skiff (🔒) for a discussion about the Chabad movement. 
• On the site over the weekend: Philip Jeffery reviewed Gareth Gore’s book about Opus Dei, finding it fails to reveal evidence of a conspiracy. 
• On the site today: Ryan Bourne and Alex Nowrasteh pen a Monday Essay about why small-government conservatives should give DOGE a chance and Stephen Eide writes about the “lived experience” folly.