Federal authorities executed a search warrant Tuesday in St. Louis in connection with an investigation in Puerto Rico of a tourist accused of setting businesses on fire last week. A hotel building's owner described the events as a "nightmare —then step by step you’re hit with the reality amid the screams." The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in St. Louis is helping authorities in the U.S. territory conduct an arson investigation, but no arrests have been made, spokesperson Lisa Storey told NBC News.

…Videos and pictures of the incident have gone viral on social media, and it has sparked outrage among Puerto Ricans on the island and in the mainland United States. The incident took place early Thursday in the small coastal town of Cabo Rojo in the southwest part of the island. The woman, whom NBC News is not naming because she has not been charged or named in the ATF investigation, left Puerto Rico and was back in the mainland, authorities in the island said.

“I wish they could have arrested her yesterday,” Cabo Rojo Mayor Jorge Morales Wiscovitch said. “She needs to be returned immediately and face the country’s justice system. It wasn’t just businesses that were burned. There were rooms on the second floor where people were sleeping. People could have been burned and killed.”

…The Cabo Rojo mayor said the suspect is a tourist who had been at one of the businesses, the restaurant, and was harassing people. Police escorted her twice to the nearby Airbnb property where she was staying, Morales said. Later that night, after the businesses closed and everyone had gone home, reports of a fire began to emerge. Morales said security video from one of the businesses allowed investigators to identify the suspect as the tourist who had been harassing people earlier in the night. She later left in a white car that picked her up, Morales said. The restaurant, Bar Marea, said Thursday on Facebook that the tourist arrived at the business late at night and seemed to be intoxicated…After the businesses closed, the woman returned with gasoline, spread it around the area and lit it on fire, the post said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/tourist-puerto-rico-fire-businesses-atf-police-investigate-rcna186666

Oxford American: What prompted or inspired you to write The Virtues of Aging?

Jimmy Carter: I think the main thing that inspired me to write it was an interview I had with Barbara Walters where she interviewed me on my seventieth birthday and outlined all the things that I had done in my life that were challenging, exciting, and interesting. She finally asked, “What’s the best time of your life?” I really hadn’t thought about it before, but I came to realize that the best time of my life is now, after retirement and when I’m seventy-four years old. I also came to realize that an American spends more than half their adult life in retirement and that many people fear that time and don’t make the proper preparations to face those years, and don’t realize that we have almost total freedom to make the choices about the things we do. Whether we are rich, sick, or in very good health or not, we still have great opportunities to lead a very good life.

… Do you feel you accomplished more while you were in the White House or after you got out?

In many ways, after the White House. When you are in the White House, as President Clinton and President Bush and I know, you are dealing with “macro-subjects.” A broad range of subjects: the Cold War; how do you deal with the Soviet Union; how do you promote peace in the Middle East; how do you deal with the suffering in your own country, with people who are on welfare, who don’t have an education, who don’t have good housing; what should you do to cement relationships with China; how do you prevent a global war from breaking out; how do you deal with the Congress; how do you prepare for your budget for the coming year; how do you modify the welfare laws. But after I left the White House, I began to deal with what I like to call “micro-things.” We now have, through The Jimmy Carter Center, projects in thirty-five African nations. We go to Africa once or twice a year to aid needy countries, and we are in the villages in Africa, we are in the homes of Africa, we are in the fields of Africa, immunizing children, eradicating disease, preventing blindness, teaching small farmers who have two acres of land how to grow more corn, rice, wheat, or sorghum. We are learning how those people live. We are learning how to prevent a civil war from breaking out in those countries. We are invited to go in and hold an honest, democratic election to end a totalitarian dictatorship. We are immersed in things that when I was president I never would have had an opportunity or an obligation to address. We have a basic guideline at the Carter Center that we don’t duplicate what others are doing. If the World Bank or the U.N. or the U.S. government or Harvard University is doing something, we don’t do it. We just fill vacuums, and a lot of the vacuums that open up to us really involve the alleviation of suffering and the promotion of human rights, democracy, and freedom for many people on earth. And that’s a kind of detailed relationship with human beings that is impossible for the best of presidents to understand or to address.

If one were asked what young people can do to better themselves, one can say: turn off the TV, read more, find fulfilling work, etc. What can older folks do to better themselves?

I think the answer is pretty much the same. It’s disturbing to some degree that so many hours out of the week are spent by older people sitting in front of a television screen like a vegetable—not eating properly, not getting any exercise, not expanding our life’s breadth of awareness, not meeting new friends, not utilizing the friendships that we have, not knowing what goes on in our own community, becoming more and more dependent on others to meet needs that we are able to meet ourselves, not having new adventures, not stretching our minds, not stretching our hearts to encompass more knowledge of God’s work, not doing anything that we consider to be worthwhile. And in the process of dormancy, our lives begin to close in on us. We live in a smaller circle of awareness and begin to restrict the number of contacts we have with human beings to fewer and fewer, and we don’t utilize what talents we have. So I think that’s a case not only with young people but with older people.

… I was surprised to learn that you and Gerald Ford have become close friends. Was there any sort of tension you both had to overcome?

[Laughter.] Oh yeah, there was a lot of tension, because he was the incumbent president, certainly hoping for a full term of his own when I ran against him and was the winner. He had to leave the White House after less than three years in office. So there was a strain between us at the beginning. Later, however, Gerald Ford and I went together to the funeral of Anwar Sadat—we went on the same plane over there and back. On the way over, we were just polite to each other, but on the way back, we had a chance to talk for about seven or eight hours, and we shared experiences and realized that we had a lot in common. And since then, he and I have become probably the closest of friends, maybe the closest between two former presidents in history. He visits my library; I visit his. We help each other with projects we are carrying out. We talk to each other on the telephone. Betty and Rosalynn have become good friends. Our children know each other. So we have developed into the kind of friends that are very valuable to each other. When an important issue comes up, such as the impeachment question concerning President Clinton, Gerald Ford and I just naturally telephone each other to discuss what we think about the situation. And when a question comes up about the Gulf War or the Mideast peace process, things that affect the incumbent president, we discuss it with each other. We have gotten so that when we are talking and riding in an automobile, we don’t want to see the car get there, because we want to talk a little bit longer. It’s gotten to be a very close relationship. He’s a great man in that he was able to get over his defeat and open himself up to our friendship.

More at https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-25-january-february-1999/jimmy-carter?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=HONORING%20JIMMY%20CARTER&utm_campaign=Editorial%20ENL

MAJOR GARRETT: One of the things we also do in the year-end correspondents roundtable is dig into what was undercovered or underreported. Jan?

JAN CRAWFORD: Undercovered and underreported, that would be, to me, Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate.

MAJOR GARRETT: At the presidential debate with Donald Trump.

JAN CRAWFORD: Unquestioned. And it's starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of managed his limitations, which has been reported in "The Wall Street Journal," for four years. And yet he insisted that he could still run for president. We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats.

It could have changed the scope of the entire election. Yet still, incredibly, we read in "The Washington Post" that his advisers are saying that he regrets that he dropped out of the race, that he thinks he could have beaten Trump. And I think that is either delusional or they're gaslighting the American people.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-full-transcript-12-29-2024/

If culture is the mirror that reflects the state of society, right now we’re all looking a little dishevelled – and struggling to find the energy to care. The signs have been there for a while, with rumblings initially picked up by trend forecasters’ finely tuned cultural seismometers. In 2021, Sean Monahan coined the term “the vibe shift” in his Substack to explain the transition from the self-controlled, self-improvement-obsessed worthiness of the 2010s to the messy decadence of the 2020s. Three years later, it feels like that earthquake has finally hit.

…The issue with foregoing all meaning and leaning into nihilism is that you can end up in some ethically dubious situations. When Nietzsche wrote his dire prediction for humanity’s future, “there can be no doubt that morality will perish”, he was surely thinking of the spectacle of convicted con artist Anna Sorokin and her ankle tag appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Our collective obsession with stories about scamming has morphed into an ironic open-armed embrace of the scammer.

The question is, are we really having a good time? In the third season of HBO’s Industry (the New Yorker’s pick for TV show of the year), copious amounts of drugs, alcohol and sex fuel the endless accumulation of money and power, but none of it basked in the glow of the 80s’ “greed is good” film and TV. Instead, each scene plays out as if lit by the most unsparing strip lighting. Characters don’t lounge opulently puffing on cigars inside high-end New York restaurants, instead huddling outside London office blocks chugging on cigarettes as if to stave off the next panic attack.

If the 2010s were a battle cry against the excesses of capitalism, social injustice and climate breakdown, popular culture in 2024 seemed to have given up the fight. Of course, the cultural pendulum will no doubt swing back again. In his missive on the next “vibe shift”, written after Donald Trump’s re-election, Monahan writes: “The vibe shift this time is a story about progressive millennials realising that when they declared total victory for their politics in 2020 – it was a pyrrhic victory … They have to get into the trenches and convince people that their interpretations of reality are correct.” It sounds like a slog, but for now, grab a sweet treat or a glass of wine. There is always next year.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/30/culture-2024-year-we-gave-up-charli-xcx?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other