AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EST

Jimmy Carter is being mourned in his tiny hometown and around the world

PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Johnny Jones found out about Jimmy Carter’s death within a matter of minutes. That’s how it works in a small town, even for a former U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize winner known throughout the world.

“Somebody texted my wife and told her about it — that’s when I found out,” Jones said Monday, a day after the 39th president died at the age of 100, surrounded by family in the one-story house he and his late wife, Rosalynn, built before he launched his first political campaign more than 60 years ago.

“His presence here in Plains has really boosted the morale of everyone who lives here,” said Jones, 85, as he recalled warm exchanges with “Mr. Jimmy” and “Ms. Rosalynn,” who died in November 2023.

Indeed, the Carters put this town of fewer than 700 people — not much bigger than when Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924 — on the world stage. His remarkable rise to the White House, landslide defeat in 1980 and rehabilitation thereafter as a freelance diplomat and global humanitarian were reflected Monday in tributes from Plains’ residents and around the world.

Not far from where Jones sat on his front porch, black ribbons hung alongside U.S. flags flying in front of the souvenir shops and cafes that make up the nucleus of Plains’ main street, which spans just a few blocks from Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters — the old train depot — to where the family once operated its peanut warehouses. TV cameras and news trucks lined the street that runs in front of the old gas station where the former president’s late brother, Billy Carter, once would hold court with national journalists who covered his older brother.

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Jimmy Carter made eradicating Guinea worm disease a top mission

JARWENG, South Sudan (AP) — Nobel Prize-winning peacemaker Jimmy Carter spent nearly four decades waging war to eliminate an ancient parasite plaguing the world’s poorest people.

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

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

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

Carter died Sunday at age 100.

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How American presidents have planned their own funerals

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jimmy Carter’s memorial journey will end at his house in the tiny town of Plains, Georgia, where he grew up on a peanut farm. That is where his wife, Rosalynn, was laid to rest last year in a burial plot that they chose years ago.

But before Carter reaches his humble final destination, there will be an interstate choreography of grief, ceremony and logistics that is characteristic of state funerals. Ever since the nation’s founding, America has bid farewell to former presidents with an intricate series of events weaving together longstanding traditions and personal touches.

Funerals often are planned by the presidents themselves, who usually have years after leaving the White House to ponder how they want to be memorialized.

“They are very much involved in the planning process, and the decisions that they make tell us a lot about who they are, how they see the presidency, and how they want to be remembered by the American people,” said Matthew Costello, senior historian for the White House Historical Association, who co-wrote a book called “Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture.”

Carter had more time to plan than most. He lived for 43 years after his presidency ended, the longest post-presidency in U.S. history, before dying Sunday at 100.

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Middle East latest: Israel intercepts Houthi missile fired from Yemen

Israel’s military said it intercepted a missile fired toward the country by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, setting off sirens late Monday in central areas including Tel Aviv.

The Houthis have been firing drones and missiles at Israel, as well as attacking shipping in the Red Sea corridor — attacks they say won’t stop until Israel agrees to a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 45,500 people, over half of them women and children, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Its count does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. The Health Ministry said Monday that Israeli airstrikes and bombardments had killed at least 27 people over the past day alone. Israel says its forces only target militants.

In Syria, Ukraine is pledging support for the new government that ousted Bashar Assad, who had been a key Russian ally in the Mideast. The Ukrainian foreign minister met with Syria’s de facto leader on Monday during a visit to Damascus.

Here’s the latest:

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Biden announces nearly $2.5 billion more in military aid for Ukraine

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Monday that the United States will send nearly $2.5 billion more in weapons to Ukraine as his administration works quickly to spend all the money it has available to help Kyiv fight off Russia before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The package includes $1.25 billion in presidential drawdown authority, which allows the military to pull existing stock from its shelves and gets weapons to the battlefield faster. It also has $1.22 billion in longer-term weapons packages to be put on contract through the separate Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, or USAI.

Biden said all longer-term USAI funds have now been spent and that he seeks to fully use all the remaining drawdown money before leaving office.

“I’ve directed my administration to continue surging as much assistance to Ukraine as quickly as possible,” Biden said in a statement. “At my direction, the United States will continue to work relentlessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in this war over the remainder of my time in office.”

In addition to the weapons support, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced Monday that the U.S. is also providing $3.4 billion in economic assistance to Ukraine to help pay for critical government services during its ongoing fight against Russia. The money will pay salaries for civilian government and school employees, healthcare workers and first responders.

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South Korea to inspect Boeing aircraft as it struggles to find cause of plane crash that killed 179

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines, as they struggle to determine what caused a plane crash that killed 179 people a day earlier.

Sunday’s crash, the country’s worst aviation disaster in decades, triggered an outpouring of national sympathy. Many people worry how effectively the South Korean government will handle the disaster as it grapples with a leadership vacuum following the recent successive impeachments of President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the country’s top two officials, amid political tumult caused by Yoon’s brief imposition of martial law earlier this month.

New acting President Choi Sang-mok on Monday presided over a task force meeting on the crash and instructed authorities to conduct an emergency review of the country’s aircraft operation systems.

“The essence of a responsible response would be renovating the aviation safety systems on the whole to prevent recurrences of similar incidents and building a safer Republic of South Korea,” said Choi, who is also deputy prime minister and finance minister.

The Boeing 737-800 plane operated by South Korean budget airline Jeju Air aborted its first landing attempt for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Then, during its second landing attempt, it received a bird strike warning from the ground control center before its pilot issued a distress signal. The plane landed without its front landing gear deployed, overshot the runway, slammed into a concrete fence and burst into a fireball.

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An appeals court upholds a $5 million award in a sexual abuse verdict against President-elect Trump

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a jury’s finding in a civil case that Donald Trump sexually abused a columnist in an upscale department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a written opinion upholding the $5 million award that the Manhattan jury granted to E. Jean Carroll for defamation and sexual abuse.

The longtime magazine columnist had testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly encounter in spring 1996 into a violent attack after they playfully entered the store’s dressing room.

Trump skipped the trial after repeatedly denying the attack ever happened. But he briefly testified at a follow-up defamation trial earlier this year that resulted in an $83.3 million award. The second trial resulted from comments then-President Trump made in 2019 after Carroll first made the accusations publicly in a memoir.

In its ruling, a three-judge panel of the appeals court rejected claims by Trump’s lawyers that trial Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had made multiple decisions that spoiled the trial, including by permitting two other women who had accused Trump of sexually abusing them to testify.

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A caucus of military veterans seeks to bridge the political divide in a polarized Congress

WASHINGTON (AP) — The players in this year’s Army-Navy football game kept up a long tradition, with each side honoring the other’s school song when the contest ended. It was an acknowledgment that the future could bring moments when the opponents that day are teammates on deadlier fields.

That ethos also guides a group in the U.S. House that calls itself the For Country Caucus. Its members are veterans with wide military experience who have banded together across party and ideological lines. At a time when bipartisan working relationships in Congress seem rare, with little hope for change in the coming session, the caucus shows there are still spaces where people with different views come together.

“We’re trying to lead by example, both within Congress to show our colleagues that this is possible, but also to America more broadly,” said Colorado Democrat Jason Crow, who is one of the outgoing co-chairs of the caucus.

“People only get deluged with the crazy aspects of Congress and the things that don’t work and the people yelling and screaming,” Crow said. “We just don’t get as much attention when we’re actually working together.”

The caucus began in 2019 to bridge the divides that plague Washington and slow its effectiveness, said Steve Womack, a Republican member of the caucus from Arkansas and a retired colonel in the Army National Guard.

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South Korean adoptees and families rocked by fraud allegations

Her greatest fear, dormant for decades, came rushing back in an instant: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child?

Peg Reif’s daughter, adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, had sent her a link to a documentary detailing how the system that made their family was rife with fraud: documents falsified, babies switched, children snatched off the street and sent abroad.

Reif wept.

She was among more than 120 who contacted The Associated Press this fall, after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline exposed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children abroad as quickly as possible to meet Western demand. The reporting shook adoption communities around the world with details about how agencies competed for babies — pressuring mothers, bribing hospitals, fabricating documents. Most who wrote were adoptees, but some were adoptive parents like Reif, horrified to learn they had supported this system.

“I can’t stand the thought that somebody lost their child,” Reif said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know how to make it right. I don’t know if I can.”

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Times Square ball takes final test for New Year’s Eve

NEW YORK (AP) — The crystal-covered ball that descends down a pole in Times Square to ring in the new year was taken for a test run Monday, as New York City officials laid out their plans for the iconic New Year’s Eve event.

Officials flipped a switch to light up the dazzling geodesic sphere — weighing almost 6 tons (5.4 metric tons) and featuring 2,688 crystal triangles — which then successfully ran up and down a 139-foot (42-meter) pole atop the One Times Square skyscraper.

Monday’s rehearsal was just one of many pre-ball drop promotional events: On Sunday, fistfuls of confetti were flung toward crowds in the square in anticipation of the 3,000 pounds (1,360 kilograms) of brightly colored paper that will fill the air at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Some of those pieces will include wishes written by people ahead of 2025.

“This is the crossroads of the entire planet right here in New York City,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said earlier Monday as he and law enforcement leaders discussed their plans for security at the celebration. “People tune in at different locations and celebrate as we do the countdown for the New Year.”

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that although there were “no specific credible threats” to the Times Square celebrations, “the public can expect to see a tremendous amount of police resources deployed throughout the area and across the city.” Plans range from “dedicated pickpocket teams” patrolling the square to sealing off all mailboxes and vending machines in the area.

The Associated Press