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Nearly 13 months after his beloved wife Rosalynn died in November 2023, former President Jimmy Carter passed away at the age of 100, the Carter Center confirmed on Sunday. The former president made a rare public appearance at her memorial service. He sat in a wheelchair with a blanket that had a picture of him and Rosalynn together. He would also make a rare public appearance on October 1 as his hometown celebrated his 100th birthday. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” President Carter said after his wife passed away. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.” The couple was married for 77 years. They met as children, both growing up in Plains, Georgia. Their storied romance started when Jimmy was 17 years old. After their first date, he reportedly told his mom, “She’s the girl I want to marry.” The pair would marry not long after — in 1946. The couple moved to Norfolk, Virginia, where Jimmy was stationed after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy. Like many military families, the Carters moved from city to city. Their three sons were born in three different states: Virginia, Hawaii and Connecticut. Their only daughter was born in their home state of Georgia. Jimmy left the military in 1953 and began a career in politics about 10 years later. RELATED STORY | Former President Jimmy Carter dies at age 100 Rosalynn was reportedly an important member of Jimmy’s campaign team when he ran for governor of Georgia, a race he won in 1970. After serving four years as governor, Jimmy decided to run for president. During the campaign, Rosalynn traveled the country independently, proving to be a strong advocate for her husband’s vision for the country. Jimmy Carter would go on to defeat President Gerald Ford and become the 39th president of the United States. Rosalynn was an active first lady. She attended cabinet meetings and frequently represented her husband at ceremonial events. Rosalynn shared in her husband’s efforts to work to make the U.S. government more “competent and compassionate,” the White House said. After leaving the White House in 1981, the couple returned to Georgia. They would go on to become some of the most notable philanthropists in the world. They founded The Carter Center, which is committed to protecting human rights around the world.Osun State Governor, Senator Ademola Adeleke has presented Staff of Office to the new Owa Obokun of Ijeshaland, Oba Clement Adesuyi Haastrup. This was made known in a statement to Naija News on Sunday by Governor Adeleke’s Spokesman, Mallam Olawale Rasheed. Top royal fathers and dignitaries at the event were Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Adeyeye Ogunwusi, Ojaja II; Oluwo of Iwoland, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi, Telu I; the Ataoja of Osogbo, Oba Jimoh Oyetunji; The Orangun of Ila, Oba Abdulwahab Oyedotun; Hon. Sunday Busy, Osun PDP Chairman; and members of the state executive council. While presenting the Staff of Office in Ilesa, the Governor admonished the new Deputy Chairman of Osun State Council of Obas that the time of competition is over and he should assume the position of father of all. He reeled out his achievement in Ijeshaland in the last two years of his administration while calling for further support from all and sundry for his administration. Ademola Adeleke “ It is with a sense of immense pride and responsibility that I stand before the good people of Ijeshaland this afternoon. In this great hall and in this historic city, we are set for the presentation of the staff of office and instrument of appointment to the new Owa Obokun of Ijeshaland, Oba Clement Adesuyi Haastrup. “I congratulate all distinguished sons and daughters of Ijeshaland both at home and abroad who are witnessing this historic moment. “Such an event took place over forty years ago when our revered departed father, Oba Gabriel Adekunle Aromolaran was presented his instrument of appointment and staff of office. His reign was long, eventful, peaceful and full of massive developments in Ijeshaland. “I pray the same for our new Owa, Ade a pe lori, Bata a pe lese. E o pe lori ite awon baba yin. “Kabiyesi, now that the time of competition is over and you have become the father of all, I urge you to rally round all citizens of Ijeshaland for the development of the area and the State at large. “I urge you to deploy your wealth of experience garnered over the years and your contacts within and outside the country for the development of Ijeshaland. There is much work to be done and the Government alone cannot be saddled with the responsibility. It calls for the concerted efforts of all and sundry. “I want to seize this opportunity to call on all Ijesha sons and daughters to continue the development of the fatherland. Our administration is intensifying developmental efforts across the state including Ijeshaland. We need your continued cooperation and collaboration to further speed up the growth process. “In the last two years of my administration, we have made tremendous impact in the massive infrastructural development of the State, Ijeshaland inclusive. For the first time in the history of Ilesa, my administration is constructing a dual carriageway in the ancient town. This is in addition to several other infrastructural developments in Ilesa and Ijeshaland in general. “I therefore urge all and sundry to continue to support this administration as we take developments to every corner of the state. I promise not to relent on our efforts to transform our dear State. We have been doing this and we will continue to do more in the new year “, the Governor noted. Responding, the new Owa Obokun of Ijesaland, Oba Clement Adesuyi Hastrup accepted to serve as the 41st Owa Obokun Adimula and the paramount ruler of Ijeshaland, while promising to rule with wisdom, justice, divine guidance and compassion. “ I accept this noble position of Owa Obokun of Ijeshaland with gratitude and reverence, knowing that it is not by might, but divine arrangement. I am humbled, privileged and honoured by the trust you have collectively placed in me. “I make a solemn promise to rule with wisdom, justice, divine guidance and compassion. I vow to protect our land, to defend our traditions and values, and to promote peace, prosperity, and happiness for all. I shall leverage on my healthy interpersonal relationships, wide social networks and global business interests cultivated over the years to bring enviable development to Ijeshaland. “I recognize that the progress of our land is built on the strength, harmony and empowerment of our people. I pledge to listen to your voices, to hear your concerns, and by the grace of Almighty God, work tirelessly to address them”, Oba Haastrup pledged. Meanwhile, the new Owa Obokun has appointed industrialist, Lateef Bakare as the new Ajiroba of Ijeshaland while Deputy Inspector General of Police, Taiwo Lakanu (Rtd.) was appointed the new Gbobaniyi of Ijeshaland. The new monarch made the announcements at his installation and presentation of staff of office. Lateef Bakare is an alumnus of Yaba College of Technology and Brookes University, United Kingdom. He is a member of Chartered Association of Certified Accountants (ACCA) UK and a member of Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), member Associate of the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria.
Energy chief Granholm warns against ‘unfettered exports’ of liquefied natural gasShopping on Temu can feel like playing an arcade game. Instead of using a joystick-controlled claw to grab a toy, visitors to the online marketplace maneuver their computer mouses or cellphone screens to browse colorful gadgets, accessories and trinkets with prices that look too good to refuse. A pop-up spinning wheel offers the chance to win a coupon. Rotating captions warn that a less than $2 camouflage print balaclava and a $1.23 skeleton hand back scratcher are “Almost sold out.” A flame symbol indicates a $9.69 plush cat print hoodie is selling fast. A timed-down selection of discounted items adds to the sense of urgency. Pages from the Shein website, left, and from the Temu site, right. Welcome to the new online world of impulse buying, a place of guilty pleasures where the selection is vast, every day is Cyber Monday, and an instant dopamine hit is always just a click away. By all accounts, we’re living in an accelerating age for consumerism, one that Temu, which is owned by the Chinese e-commerce company PDD Holdings, and Shein, its fierce rival , supercharged with social media savvy and an interminable assortment of cheap goods, most shipped directly from merchants in China based on real-time demand. The business models of the two platforms, coupled with avalanches of digital or influencer advertising, have enabled them to give Western retailers a run for their money this holiday shopping season. A Christmas tree ornament purchased on Temu. Software company Salesforce said it expects roughly one in five online purchases in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada to be made through four online marketplaces based or founded in Asia: Shein, Temu, TikTok Shop — the e-commerce arm of video-sharing platform TikTok — and AliExpress. Analysts with Salesforce said they are expected to pull in roughly $160 billion in global sales outside of China. Most of the sales will go to Temu and Shein, a privately held company which is thought to lead the worldwide fast fashion market in revenue. Lisa Xiaoli Neville, a nonprofit manager who lives in Los Angeles, is sold on Shein. The bedroom of her home is stocked with jeans, shoes, press-on nails and other items from the ultra-fast fashion retailer, all of which she amassed after getting on the platform to buy a $2 pair of earrings she saw in a Facebook ad. Neville, 46, estimates she spends at least $75 a month on products from Shein. A $2 eggshell opener, a portable apple peeler and an apple corer, both costing less than $5, are among the quirky, single-use kitchen tools taking up drawer space. She acknowledges she doesn’t need them because she “doesn’t even cook like that.” Plus, she’s allergic to apples. “I won’t eat apples. It will kill me,” Neville said, laughing. “But I still want the coring thing.” Shein, now based in Singapore, uses some of the same web design features as Temu’s, such as pop-up coupons and ads, to persuade shoppers to keep clicking, but it appears a bit more restrained in its approach. Shein primarily targets young women through partnerships with social media influencers. Searching the company's name on video platforms turns up creators promoting Shein's Black Friday sales event and displaying the dozens of of trendy clothes and accessories they got for comparatively little money. But the Shein-focused content also includes videos of TikTokers saying they're embarrassed to admit they shopped there and critics lashing out at fans for not taking into account the environmental harms or potential labor abuses associated with products that are churned out and shipped worldwide at a speedy pace. Neville has already picked out holiday gifts for family and friends from the site. Most of the products in her online cart cost under $10, including graphic T-shirts she intends to buy for her son and jeans and loafers for her daughter. All told, she plans to spend about $200 on gifts, significantly less than $500 she used to shell out at other stores in prior years. “The visuals just make you want to spend more money,” she said, referring to the clothes on Shein's site. “They're very cheap and everything is just so cute.” Unlike Shein, Temu's appeal cuts across age groups and gender. The platform is the world’s second most-visited online shopping site, software company Similarweb reported in September. Customers go there looking for practical items like doormats and silly products like a whiskey flask shaped like a vintage cellphone from the 1990s. Temu advertised Black Friday bargains for some items at upwards of 70% off the recommended retail price. Making a purchase can quickly result in receiving dozens of emails offering free giveaways. The caveat: customers have to buy more products. Despite their rise, Temu and Shein have proven particularly ripe for pushback. Last year, a coalition of unnamed brands and organizations launched a campaign to oppose Shein in Washington. U.S. lawmakers also have raised the possibility that Temu is allowing goods made with forced labor to enter the country. More recently, the Biden administration put forward rules that would crack down on a trade rule known as the de minimis exception, which has allowed a lot of cheap products to come into the U.S. duty-free. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to slap high tariffs on goods from China, a move that would likely raise prices across the retail world. Both Shein and Temu have set up warehouses in the U.S. to speed up delivery times and help them better compete with Amazon, which is trying to erode their price advantage through a new storefront that also ships products directly from China. 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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More The UAE government-backed Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has announced the launch of Falcon 3, a family of open-source small language models (SLMs) designed to run efficiently on lightweight, single GPU-based infrastructures. Falcon 3 features four model sizes — 1B, 3B, 7B, and 10B — with base and instruct variants, promising to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities for developers, researchers, and businesses. According to the Hugging Face leaderboard, the models are already outperforming or closely matching popular open-source counterparts in their size class, including Meta’s Llama and category leader Qwen-2.5. The development comes at a time when the demand for SLMs , with fewer parameters and simpler designs than LLMs, is rapidly growing due to their efficiency, affordability, and ability to be deployed on devices with limited resources. They are suitable for a range of applications across industries, like customer service, healthcare, mobile apps and IoT, where typical LLMs might be too computationally expensive to run effectively. According to Valuates Reports , the market for these models is expected to grow, with a CAGR of nearly 18% over the next five years. What does Falcon 3 bring to the table? Trained on 14 trillion tokens — more than double its predecessor Falcon 2 — the Falcon 3 family employs a decoder-only architecture with grouped query attention to share parameters and minimize memory usage for key-value (KV) cache during inference. This enables faster and more efficient operations when handling diverse text-based tasks. At the core, the models support four primary languages — English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—and come equipped with a 32K context window, allowing them to process long inputs, such as heavily worded documents. “Falcon 3 is versatile, designed for both general-purpose and specialized tasks, providing immense flexibility to users. Its base model is perfect for generative applications, while the instruct variant excels in conversational tasks like customer service or virtual assistants,” TII notes on its website . According to the leaderboard on Hugging Face, while all four Falcon 3 models perform fairly well, the 10B and 7B versions are the stars of the show, achieving state-of-the-art results on reasoning, language understanding, instruction following, code and mathematics tasks. Among models under the 13B-parameter size class, Falcon 3’s 10B and 7B versions outperform competitors, including Google’s Gemma 2-9B , Meta’s Llama 3.1-8B, Mistral-7B , and Yi 1.5-9B. They even surpass Alibaba’s category leader Qwen 2.5-7B in most benchmarks — such as MUSR, MATH, GPQA, and IFEval — except for MMLU, which is the test for evaluating how well language models understand and process human language. Deployment across industries With the Falcon 3 models now available on Hugging Face , TII aims to serve a broad range of users, enabling cost-effective AI deployments without computational bottlenecks. With their ability to handle specific, domain-focused tasks with fast processing times, the models can power various applications at the edge and in privacy-sensitive environments, including customer service chatbots, personalized recommender systems, data analysis, fraud detection, healthcare diagnostics, supply chain optimization and education. The institute also plans to expand the Falcon family further by introducing models with multimodal capabilities. These models are expected to launch sometime in January 2025. Notably, all models have been released under the TII Falcon License 2.0, a permissive Apache 2.0-based license with an acceptable use policy that encourages responsible AI development and deployment. To help users get started, TII has also launched a Falcon Playground, a testing environment where researchers and developers can try out Falcon 3 models before integrating them into their applications. If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI. Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here . An error occured.
MiLaysia Fulwiley put up 23 points and Chloe Kitts scored 19 points and grabbed 10 rebounds as No. 1 South Carolina routed Coppin State 92-60 on Thursday in Columbia, S.C. Te-Hina Paopao added 13 points and five assists for the Gamecocks (3-0). Joyce Edwards and Maryam Dauda each contributed 10 points for South Carolina, which shot 51.5 percent from the floor and compiled a 51-23 rebounding edge. Laila Lawrence scored 20 points and Angel Jones notched 17 for the Eagles (2-2). No. 8 Iowa State 80, St. Thomas (Minn.) 47 Audi Crooks shot 12-for-17 en route to 26 points and pulled down a game-high eight rebounds as the Cyclones topped the Tommies in Ames, Iowa. Sydney Harris registered 13 points while Addy Brown had 10 for Iowa State (4-0). Amber Scalia's 11 points paced St. Thomas (3-1). No. 10 Kansas State 86, Creighton 68 Ayoka Lee powered for 28 points in 16 minutes as the Wildcats topped the Bluejays in Manhattan, Kan. Kansas State (3-0) jumped out to a 22-9 lead after one quarter and rolled to the win. Temira Poindexter and Serena Sundell each had 12 points for the Wildcats, with Sundell adding eight assists and seven rebounds. Kennedy Townsend scored 16 points, Morgan Maly added 15 and Kiani Lockett had 11 for Creighton (1-2). No. 13 North Carolina State 79, Kent State 51 After leading by just five points at halftime, the Wolfpack expanded the lead in the third quarter and then cruised in the fourth to beat the Golden Flashes in Raleigh, N.C. Aziaha James paced NC State (2-1) with 20 points and nine rebounds, and Zamareya Jones scored 16 points. Kent State (1-2) got 17 points and eight rebounds from Bridget Dunn, plus 15 points from Jenna Batsch. No. 16 Duke 84, Dayton 49 Six players logged double-figure point totals for the Blue Devils in the one-sided victory over the Flyers at Durham, N.C. Ten players hit the scoresheet overall for Duke (3-1), which got a team-high 17 points from Jordan Wood. Toby Fournier added 15 points. Ivy Wolf had 14 points and seven rebounds, and Ajok Madol contributed 12 points for Dayton (2-1), which shot 32.1 percent from the floor and committed 24 turnovers. No. 17 Baylor 104, East Texas A&M 55 Darianna Littlepage-Buggs recorded 22 points and 11 rebounds as the Bears nearly doubled up the Lions in Waco, Texas. Aaronette Vonleh (18 points, 11 rebounds) also had a double-double for Baylor (2-1). Cora Horvath was the top offensive threat for East Texas A&M (2-2) with 22 points. No. 19 Ole Miss 80, Delaware State 42 Starr Jacobs hit 8 of 10 shots from the floor and scored 18 points as the Rebels pulled away from the Hornets in Dover, Del. Madison Scott, Kennedy Todd-Williams and Sira Thienou each put up 13 points for Ole Miss (2-1), which outscored Delaware State 43-21 in the second half. The Hornets (1-3) were led by Kiarra Mcelrath with 13 points and Mahogany Cottingham with 10. No. 22 Alabama 88, Alcorn State 59 Essence Cody amassed 18 points, eight rebounds and four blocks as the Crimson Tide thrashed the Lady Braves in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Aaliyah Nye scored 17 points, Eris Lester had 15 and seven rebounds, and Sarah Ashlee Barker chipped in with 14 points and three steals for the Crimson Tide (5-0). Destiny Brown was the only player in double figures for Alcorn State (1-3), scoring 12 points. No. 23 Illinois 84, Eastern Illinois 37 Reserve Jasmine Brown-Hagger hit 10 of 15 shots scored 23 points to lead the Fighting Illini to a laugher against the Panthers in Champaign, Ill. Gretchen Dolan added 13 points, Kendall Bostic produced 11 points and 12 rebounds and Adalia McKenzie also had 11 points for Illinois (3-0). Jayda Johnston finished with eight points for Eastern Illinois (0-3). --Field Level MediaEXCLUSIVE: How EQUA Tackles Stigma In Cannabis Insurance With Tailored SolutionsChristmas Day was once the exclusive territory of the NBA. In recent years, the NFL has decided to invade that territory and play multiple games on Christmas. While this has yielded increased revenues for the NFL, it doesn’t make former Steelers legend Ben Roethlisberger happy at all. “It’s miserable. It’s a shame that the league does this. It just shows that it’s all about money, and this is a way that they can, you know, make more money and figure this thing out because it’s not fair for the players,” Roethlisberger said on his podcast, Channel 7. “You wanna talk about injuries and making the game safer, changing the kickoff rule and preventing guys on hip-drop tackles, and concussions, and this that and the other, and you’re going to make guys play the most violent game in the world, arguably, three games in 11 days. I mean, there’s no time for your body to get healthy and rest.” The Christmas games themselves aren’t such a big deal. What’s a big deal is that teams who played last Saturday (the Steelers, Chiefs, Ravens, and Texans) now have to play again on Wednesday. With those teams having to turn around and play on January 5, it all adds up to three games in 11 days. Roethlisberger isn’t alone in his criticism; Chiefs QB Pat Mahomes recently indicated that he is also not a fan of the scheduling. “It’s not a good feeling,” Mahomes told reporters. “You never want to play this amount of games in this short of time. It’s not great for your body. But, at the end of the day, it’s your job, your profession. You have to come to work and do it.”
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