GOMA, Congo -- At least 15 people were killed in eastern Congo after a group of children brought home an explosive device that they had found while they were playing, a community leader said Saturday.

The tragedy took place Friday evening in the village of Kyangitsi, located in Masisi territory in North Kivu province.

“At around 8 p.m. local time, while some of the residents were trying to find out what it was, the bomb exploded," said Telesphore Mitondeke, a member of a Masisi grouping of civil society organizations.

For the past two weeks, the region has been the scene of hostilities between local armed groups vying for control of villages.

Many localities already have fallen under the control of the “Wazalendo” patriot self-defense forces. According to local community leaders, part of the strategic town of Kitshanga is now in the hands of the young patriots, who have managed to dislodge the M23 rebels.

The ongoing clashes have caused panic among the population, prompting many civilians to flee. Mitondeke said the area “is littered with numerous explosive devices abandoned and booby-trapped by fighters."

Let's look back at Series Two of the modern era of Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies' second season, and David Tennant's first season as The Tenth Doctor. It was here that the series' shift into a global phenomenon began, and Tennant became the face of the modern era of Doctor Who in the same way Tom Baker is still associated with the classic era of the series. Yes, hardcore fans would prefer to say William Hartnell was the true face of the show or Jon Pertwee was their Doctor, but casual punters still think of Baker, partly because he was on the show longer than anyone else.

Just as Davies cast Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor after working with him on the miniseries The Second Coming the year before, Tennant had starred in Davies' cheeky, comedic, postmodern version of Casanova in 2005, the year Ecclestone premiered in Davies' revival of Doctor Who. There Tennant carried a whole series for the first time, playing a sexy, roguish rake, and seemed a natural to take over when Ecclestone left after only one season.

Tennant already had Science Fiction credentials: he had spent years playing bit parts and supporting roles in Big Finish audio dramas, though it would be decades before he played the Tenth Doctor on the audios. He played the dimension-hopping secret agent lead in Big Finish's audio adaptation of Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (and will return in the decades-later sequel). He played a doctor in BBC Three's 2005 live broadcast remake of Nigel Kneale's The Quatermass Experiment, and he was on set in between scenes when he got the call that he had been cast in as the Tenth Doctor.

Davies and Tennant leaned into portraying The Doctor as a sexy geek, which went down a treat with a new generation of teenage female fans discovering the show for the first time. It was his Doctor that truly made the series popular with female viewers, on top of how many of them identified with Billie Piper's Rose. To have Tennant and Piper together was a double whammy of Secret Sauce. For male fans, Tennant made being a geek cool – he was cocky, cheeky, a chick magnet, and the smartest smart aleck in the room. What's not to like about this Doctor? Davies could use Tennant's popularity to start making really big swings with the show and establish many of the modern show's tropes that are still being used, possibly overused in some instances. It was here that the new Doctor Who really began to become the show it was meant to be. No wonder Davies brought him back to relaunch the show on its 60th Anniversary this year before he passes the torch to another new era.

A former US Army sergeant has been arrested for illegally retaining classified information and attempting to provide it to China's spy service.

Joseph Schmidt, 29, allegedly made numerous documents and Google searches which describe his attempts to provide US national security secrets to China.

His "efforts to betray our country", Washington state federal prosecutor Tessa Gorman said, were "shocking".

He was arrested at the San Francisco airport after arriving from Hong Kong.

Mr Schmidt was an active-duty soldier from 2015 to 2020, mostly serving at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in western Washington.

He primarily worked in intelligence and had access to Top Secret documents, the highest level of classified information in the US government.

Investigators say he conducted online research about how to defect to China and offered his services as an "interrogator" to the the Chinese consulate in Turkey and to China's intelligence service.

"I have a current top secret clearance, and would like to talk to someone from the Government to share this information with you if that is possible," he is alleged to have written in one email to the Istanbul consulate.

He is accused of creating a Microsoft Word document entitled "high level secrets".

Prosecutors say the title of the 23-page document was written in Chinese, but "nearly all of it is written in English".

Another document is titled "important information to share with Chinese government".

Web searches show that he consulted several spying forums on social media app Reddit, including "What Do Real Spies Do and How are they Recruited", and read one article titled "Ten Countries That Hate America Most".

After his army service ended, he moved to Turkey for around one month before moving to China. He did not return to the US until he landed in San Francisco on Friday.

"Members of our military take a sworn oath to defend our country and the Constitution," said Mrs Gorman, the acting US attorney for the Western District of Washington.

"In that context the alleged actions of this former military member are shocking - not only attempting to provide national defence information, but also information that would assist a foreign adversary to gain access to Department of Defense secure computer networks."

Mr Schmidt has been charged with attempting to deliver national defence information and retention of national defence information. He faces decades in prison if convicted.

It is not clear if he has hired a lawyer who can comment on his behalf.

The arrest comes just two months after two active duty members of the US Navy were arrested for spying for China in southern California.

Both men were allegedly paid thousands of dollars for blueprints and technical manuals and diagrams of ships and radar systems.

Ukraine has achieved the “functional defeat” of Vladimir Putin’s prized Black Sea fleet with intensified attacks in recent weeks, a UK defence minister has suggested – but warned that Western allies are running out of ammunition to help Kyiv repel Russia’s invasion.

Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum from the Polish capital on Tuesday, James Heappey said the kneecapping of the major Russian naval force – including the recent strike on its Crimean headquarters – was “every bit as important” as Ukraine’s gains in Kharkiv last year.

While “nobody can pretend otherwise” that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has progressed slowly, the UK’s armed forces minister told delegates it was “simply wrong” to suggest there has been no progress at all – with gains “every single day” after breaching Russia’s “enormous defensive belt and minefield”.

But comparing Kyiv’s relatively minor gains to those achieved last year “diminishes the importance of what has happened in the Black Sea over the last couple of weeks, where a Russian submarine and a Russian ship have been put out of action, and the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet has been put out of action too”, he said.

“The functional defeat of the Black Sea fleet – and I would argue that is what it is, because it has been forced to disperse to ports from which it cannot have an effect on Ukraine – is an enormous credit. And [it is] every bit as important – every bit as much progress – as what was happening in the Kharkiv Oblast last year.”

The Black Sea fleet, of huge symbolic value to Russia, has been an increasing target of Ukrainian drone attacks in recent weeks. Throughout the war, the fleet has been used to launch missile attacks on Ukraine and to threaten Kyiv’s vital shipped grain exports.

With Russia finally pulling out of a UN-brokered grain deal in July, Kyiv has since sought to establish a new corridor hugging the coastline, through which two Marshall Islands and Cameroon-flagged vessels were said to be the lastest ships to sail to the port of Odesa on Tuesday.

And the UK’s Ministry of Defence said on Monday that the Black Sea fleet was “[struggling] to deal with concurrent threats”, with Russia resorting to using air power to “project force” over the area as fleet activies relocate from under-fire Sevastopol to Novorssiysk, some 322km (200 miles) east.

But Mr Heappey and Nato’s most senior military official, Admiral Rob Bauer, were among those to warn that Kyiv’s allies are running out of ammunition, with the latter lamenting that “the bottom of the barrel is now visible” and urging nations to “ramp up production in a much higher tempo”.

“We need large volumes,” the admiral said. “The just-in-time, just-enough economy we built together in 30 years in our liberal economies is fine for a lot of things – but not the armed forces when there is a war ongoing.”

Also warning that Western stockpiles are “looking a bit thin”, Mr Heappey said: “If it’s not the time when there is a war in Europe to spend 2 per cent on defence, then when is?”

Underscoring such warnings, US president Joe Biden – who is struggling to pass a package of aid for Ukraine through Congress – convened a phone call of G7 and Nato leaders on Tuesday in which he expressed determination to secure the funding, with Rishi Sunak also vowing to support Kyiv for “as long as it takes”.

The comments came as Ukraine’s airforce claimed to have destroyed 29 of 31 drones launched by Russia and one cruise missile, most of them targeting the regions of Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk in the south and east, in an overnight barrage of attacks lasting three hours.

With counteroffensive operations continuing in Zaporizhzhia and near Bakhmut, president Volodymyr Zelensky also visited troops and commanders in the northeast near Kupiansk, where the Ukrainian military says Russian forces have also been staging attacks.

Meanwhile, a report alleged that hundreds of drunk, insubordinate and mutinous Russian soldiers have been pressed into penal units known as “Storm-Z” squads and sent to the frontlines as punishment for their behaviour.

“If the commandants catch anyone with the smell of alcohol on their breath, then they immediately send them to the Storm squads,” one soldier told a Reuters investigation, which cited 13 people with knowledge of the matter, including five fighters in such units.

Alternative headline: Paramount Accidentally Reinvents Quibi

Happy Mean Girls Day to all who celebrate!

In observance of the date, Paramount Pictures launched an official account for “Mean Girls” on TikTok (at this link) — and has made the entire one hour, 47 minute film available for free on the platform, broken up into 23 clips.

The bio for the official “Mean Girls” TikTok account says, “Get in loser, we’re going shopping.” Mean Girls Day has become popular among fans of the 2004 film because of a scene where Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) asks Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) what day it is, and she replies, “It’s Oct. 3” — as shown in this clip.

If you prefer to watch movies the old-fashioned way, “Mean Girls” is currently available on Paramount+ and free to watch on YouTube with ads (as well as available to buy via digital video stores like Amazon and Apple iTunes). The TikTok account links out to Paramount’s website listing retailers that offer DVD, Blu-ray and digital versions of “Mean Girls” for purchase.

Co-starring and written by Tina Fey, “Mean Girls” stars Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese and Amy Poehler.

Here’s the synopsis of the cult-classic teen movie: After living in Africa with her zoologist parents, Cady Heron (Lohan) must brave the wilds of high school where she is taken under the wing of the popular girls, The Plastics, led by the cool and cruel Regina George (McAdams). “What follows is a treasure trove of sharp, witty humor that defined a generation, inspired a hit Broadway musical and popularized countless catchphrases,” the studio says.

Paramount’s musical movie of “Mean Girls,” based on the Broadway adaptation, is set for theatrical release on Jan. 12, 2024 (after it was originally planned to debut on Paramount+). Reneé Rapp, Angourie Rice, Jaquel Spivey and Auli’i Cravalho star in the new movie, with Rapp reprising her turn as Regina George from the stage production.

MADRID, Oct 1 (Reuters) - At least 13 people have been killed in a fire in a nightclub in Murcia in southeast Spain, emergency services said on Sunday, adding that rescuers were still searching for people unaccounted for after the blaze.

Outside the club, young people hugged, looking shocked as they waited for information after the fire that broke out in the early hours in Atalayas, on the outskirts of the city.

"I think we left 30 seconds to 1 minute before the alarms went off and all the lights went out (and) the screams saying there was a fire," one survivor, who was not identified, said.

"Five family members and two friends are missing."

Spanish media reported that several of the dead were from one group that was celebrating a birthday.

Diego Seral, of Spain's National Police, told reporters the dead were found in the Fonda Milagros nightclub, one of three adjoining clubs, which had sustained the majority of fire damage, including the collapse of its roof, he added.

The collapse was making it difficult to locate victims, and it was difficult to pinpoint yet where exactly the fire started, he said.

Police investigators have not yet been able to access the site due to the high temperatures and danger of collapse.

The identification of the bodies would take time, Seral said. The emergency services gave the death toll, which has risen steadily throughout the day, as 13. The cause of the blaze is being investigated.

Earlier, Murcia's Mayor Jose Ballesta told reporters seven bodies had been found in the same area of the first floor, where the fire broke out.

A spokesperson for the Teatre nightclub, Maria Dolores Albellan, told reporters the fire originated in the neighbouring club, Fonda Milagros, before spreading to the two adjoining clubs.

Ballesta declared three days of mourning for those who had died. Flags were lowered to half mast outside Murcia's City Hall.

Footage released by Murcia's fire service showed firefighters working to control flames inside the nightclub. The fire had destroyed part of the roof, the footage showed.

"We are devastated," Ballesta said on Spanish TV channel 24h, adding rescuers were still searching for several people reported missing.

Ballesta told 24h the fire started at around 6 a.m and had now been brought under control.

Four people have been treated in hospital for smoke inhalation.

As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to the public because the researchers’ institutions pay “article-processing charges” to a publisher. “Green” OA papers are available because the authors self-archive their work on a personal Web site or institutional repository that is publicly accessible.

The self-archived copies are generally the accepted manuscripts, rather than the final published version, largely because academics foolishly assign copyright to the publishers. This gives the latter the power to refuse to allow members of the public to read published research they have paid for with their taxes, unless they pay again with a subscription to the journal, or on a per article basis.

You might think that is unfair and inconvenient, but easy to circumvent, because the public will be able to download copies of the peer-reviewed manuscripts that the researchers self-archive as green OA. But many publishers have a problem with the idea that people can access for free the papers in any form, and demand that public access to the green OA versions should be embargoed, typically for 12 months. There is no reason for academics to agree to this other than habit and a certain deference on their part. It’s also partly the fault of the funding agencies. The open access expert and campaigner, Peter Suber, explained in 2005 why they are to blame:

Researchers sign funding contracts with the research councils long before they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers. Funders have a right to dictate terms, such as mandated open access, precisely because they are upstream from publishers. If one condition of the funding contract is that the grantee will deposit the peer-reviewed version of any resulting publication in an open-access repository [immediately], then publishers have no right to intervene.

Accepting embargoes on green OA at all was perhaps the biggest blunder made by the open access movement and their funders. Even today, nearly 20 years after Suber pointed out the folly of letting publishers tell academics what they can do with their own manuscripts, many publishers still demand – and get – embargoes. Against this background, ACS Publications, the publishing wing of the American Chemical Society, has come up with what it calls “Zero-Embargo Green Open Access” (pointed out by Richard Poynder):

A number of funders and institutions require authors to retain the right to post their accepted manuscripts immediately upon acceptance for publication in a journal, sometimes referred to as zero-embargo green open access (OA). More than 90% of ACS authors under these mandates have a simple and funded pathway to publish gold OA in ACS journals.

For those not covered by an institutional read and publish agreement or through other types of funding, ACS offers the option to post their accepted manuscripts with a CC BY license in open access repositories immediately upon acceptance. This option expands this small subset of authors’ choices beyond the existing option to wait 12 months to post at no cost.

Great news? Well, no, because a hefty new fee must be paid:

The article development charge (ADC) is a flat fee of $2,500 USD and is payable once the manuscript is sent for peer review. The ADC covers the cost of ACS’ pre-acceptance publishing services, from initial submission through to the final editorial decision.

That is, if academics publish a paper with the ACS, their institution must pay $2,500 for the privilege of being allowed to post immediately the accepted manuscript version on their own institutional server – something that should have been a matter of course, but was weakly given up in the early days of open access, as Suber pointed out. There is a feeble attempt to justify the cost, on the basis that the $2,500 is for “pre-acceptance publishing service”. But this apparently refers to things like peer review, which is generally conducted by fellow academics for free, and decisions by journal editors, who are often unpaid too. In general, the costs involved in “pre-acceptance publishing” are negligible.

“Zero-Embargo Green Open Access” sounds so promising. But it turns out to be yet another example of the copyright industry’s limitless sense of entitlement. Publishing is constantly finding new ways to extract money from hard-pressed academic institutions – money that could be used for more research or simply paying underfunded researchers better.

This is a personal issue for me. In 2013, I spoke at a conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Berlin declaration on open access. More formally, the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” is one of three seminal formulations of the open access idea: the other two are the Bethesda Statement (2003) and the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) (all discussed in Walled Culture the book, free digital versions available). I entitled my speech “Half a Revolution”, and the slides I used can be freely downloaded from SlideShare, along with many more of my presentations.

My Berlin talk concluded with a call to action under the slogan “Zero Embargo Now” (ZEN). Back then, I looked forward to a world where all academic papers would routinely be available under green OA immediately, without any embargo. I’m still waiting.

“Saw X” begins with the kind of reverse time jump that only a horror franchise on its tenth film would dare to attempt. After the previous eight sequels advanced the story of John “Jigsaw” Kramer and his many imitators in a relatively linear fashion — while relying heavily on flashbacks to keep including Tobin Bell after his character’s early death — “Saw X” takes place in 2004, just three weeks after the events of the original film.

John Kramer is still alive in the new movie, battling a deteriorating cancer diagnosis that simultaneously serves as his motivation and an explanation for why he appears to have aged 20 years in three weeks. When his prognosis looks bleak, he travels to Mexico City to participate in an experimental treatment program that offers him a new lease on life. But when he finds out that the costly procedure was a scam and his cancer wasn’t actually cured, he sets out to exact revenge in the only way he knows how: playing a game with an arsenal of lethal homemade traps.

The narrative gambit turned “Saw X” into the most emotional film in the franchise, but it also placed its team in the predicament of having to deliver a tenth “Saw” movie that feels like it’s the third one. The early “Saw” films were sparse affairs that took great pride in constructing traps out of easily available materials that actually worked from a mechanical standpoint. But as the series grew, so did its narrative ambitions. It wasn’t long before Jigsaw and co. were using lasers and trains to make outlandish traps that were almost cartoonish in their violence. They served a narrative purpose in the wackier sequels — but for “Saw X,” everyone knew it was time to return to the barebones simplicity of early traps like “The Magnum Eyehole” and “The Needle Pit.”

“We knew we wanted to make the traps less complicated,” executive producer Mark Burg said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “We wanted to make traps that you could basically put together from Home Depot. At some point our traps got bigger and more complex, and we wanted to bring it back down.”

The task of constructing the stripped-down traps fell to production designer Anthony Stabley, a newcomer to the franchise who took the assignment seriously. Stabley told IndieWire that he limited his research to the first two “Saw” movies in order to ensure that his designs aligned with their place in the franchise’s larger timeline. Once it was time to start building, he prioritized simplicity to drive home the point that Kramer built these traps himself with limited resources.

“As far as the traps were concerned, our main objective was to make sure that everybody believes that John Kramer made these traps,” Stabley said. “We wanted to make sure that it reflects the early ‘Saw’ films.”

The simplified ethos extended all the way up to director Kevin Greutert, who previously directed “Saw VI” and “Saw 3D” and has edited all ten films in the series. He told IndieWire that, after 20 years of working on the franchise, he has a keen eye for discerning which shots are actually necessary to advance the larger story. On “Saw X,” he resisted the temptation to indulge in flashy cinematography in favor of a more utilitarian shot list that parallels the earlier films.

“I think I have more experience knowing exactly what kind of coverage I want,” Greutert said. “DPs and directors always want ‘cool shots,’ but to me the cool shot still has to tell some of the story. It still has to ground you emotionally and in the characters and not just be auteurish-looking.”

By simplifying everything, the team was able to pull off the kind of smooth timeline reset that has evaded countless other horror franchises. Bringing the action back to 2004 had the dual benefit of placating longtime “Saw” junkies who missed the feel of the original films and offering an easier entry point for new fans who haven’t ingested all the mythology.

“We tried to accomplish two things,” executive producer Oren Koules said. “We wanted to bring it back to O.G. We wanted an original ‘Saw’ movie. We wanted John Kramer very featured in this movie. But we also wanted a movie that was accessible to people that had never seen a ‘Saw’ movie.”

ATLANTA (AP) — Jimmy Carter has always been a man of discipline and habit. But the former president will break routine Sunday, putting off his practice of quietly watching church services online to instead celebrate his 99th birthday with his wife, Rosalynn, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Plains.

The gathering will take place in the same one-story structure where the Carters lived before he was first elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962. It comes amid tributes from around the world. But for Carter’s family, it’s an opportunity to honor a personal legacy.

“The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of South Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” said grandson Jason Carter, who chairs the board at The Carter Center, which his grandparents founded in 1982 after leaving the White House a year earlier.

Despite being global figures, the younger Carter said his grandparents have always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be.”

Celebrating the longest-lived U.S. president this way was inconceivable not long ago. The Carters announced in February that their patriarch was forgoing further medical treatments and entering home hospice care after a series of hospitalizations. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at age 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.

“If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be an towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chairperson and presidential campaign manager who got her start on Carter’s campaigns. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”

Jill Stuckey, a longtime Plains resident who visits the former first couple regularly, cautioned to “never underestimate Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”

His latest resilience has allowed Carter a rare privilege even for presidents: He’s been able to enjoy months of accolades typically reserved for when a former White House resident dies. The latest round includes a flood of messages from world leaders and pop culture figures donning “Jimmy Carter 99” hats, with many of them focusing on Carter’s four decades of global humanitarian work after leaving the Oval Office.

Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a U.S. television network’s evening news broadcast, praised Carter in a social media video for his “relentless effort every day to make the world a better place.”

She pointed to Carter’s work to eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness, while advocating for peace and democracy in scores of countries. She noted he has written 32 books and worked for decades with Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income people.

“Oh, yeah, and you were governor of Georgia. And did I mention president of the United States?” she joked. “When are you going to stop slacking off?”

Bill Clinton, the 42nd president and first Democratic president after Carter’s landslide defeat, showed no signs of the chilly relationship the two fellow Southerners once had.

“Jimmy! Happy birthday,” Clinton said. “You only get to be 99 once. It’s been a long, good ride, and we thank you for your service and your friendship and the enduring embodiment of the American dream.”

Musician Peter Gabriel led concertgoers at Madison Square Garden in a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” as did the Indigo Girls at a recent concert.

In Atlanta, the Carter Library & Museum and adjacent The Carter Center was holding a weekend of events, including a naturalization ceremony for 99 new citizens on Sunday. Festivities at the museum, which offered 99-cent admission Saturday, were slated to continue Sunday after Congress came to an agreement to avoid a partial government shutdown at the start of the federal fiscal year, which coincides with Carter’s birthday.

Jason Carter said his grandfather has found it “gratifying” to see reassessments of his presidency. Carter’s term often has been broad-brushed as a failure because of inflation, global fuel shortages and the holding of American hostages in Iran, a confluence that led to Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 romp.

Yet Carter’s focus on diplomacy, his emphasis on the environment before the climate crisis was widely acknowledged and his focus on efficient government — his presidency added a relative pittance to the national debt — have garnered second looks from historians.

Indeed, Carter’s longevity offers a frame to illuminate both how much the world has changed over his lifetime while still recognizing that certain political and societal challenges endure.

The Carter Center’s disease-eradication work occurs mostly in developing countries. But Jimmy and Roslaynn Carter were first exposed to river blindness growing up surrounded by the crushing poverty of the rural Deep South during the Great Depression.

The Center’s global democracy advocacy has reached countries that were still part of various European empires when Carter was born in 1924 or were under heavy American influence in the decades after World War II. Yet in recent years, Carter has declared his own country to be more of an “oligarchy” than a well-functioning democracy. And the Center has since become involved in monitoring and tracking U.S. elections.

Carter has lived long enough finally to have a genuine friend in the Oval Office again. President Joe Biden was a young Delaware politician in 1976 and became the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s campaign against better-known Washington figures. Now, as Biden seeks reelection in 2024, he faces the headwinds of inflation that Republicans openly compare to Carter’s economy. Biden had a wooden birthday cake display placed on the White House front law to honor Carter.

The year Carter was born, Congress passed sweeping immigration restrictions, sharply curtailing Ellis Island as a portal to the nation. Now, the naturalization ceremony to mark Carter’s 99th birthday comes as Washington continues a decades-long fight over immigration policy. Republicans, especially, have moved well to the right of Reagan, who in 1986 signed a sweeping amnesty policy for millions of immigrants who were in the country illegally or had no sure legal path to citizenship.

Carter also was born into Jim Crow segregation, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched openly on state capitols and in Washington. As governor and president, Carter set new marks for appointing Black Americans to top government posts. At 99, Carter’s Sunday online church circuit includes watching Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Yet, at the same time, some white state lawmakers in Carter’s native region are defying the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to curtail Black voters’ strength at the ballot box.

Jason Carter said understanding his grandfather’s impact means resisting the urge to assess whether he solved every problem he confronted or won every election. Instead, he said, the takeaway is to recognize a sweeping impact rooted in respecting other people on an individual level and trying to help them.

“You don’t get more out of a life than he got, right?” the younger Carter said. “It is a incredible, full rich life with a long marriage, a wonderful partnership with my grandmother, and the ability to see the world and interact with the world in ways that almost nobody else has ever been able to do.”

By now, you may have heard about Elon Musk's handpicked CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino, and her disastrous interview with CNBC's Julia Boorstin at Vox Media's Code 2023 event. However, somewhat overlooked amid some of the more viral moments of the discussion, Yaccarino dropped some previously unknown stats that don't exactly paint such a rosy picture for the company:

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is losing daily active users under the leadership of Elon Musk.

Speaking at Vox Media's Code 2023 tech conference earlier this week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared that the company currently has 225 million daily active users – a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 percent of users from just before Musk acquired the company.

According to a series of tweets that Musk himself posted in November of last year, Twitter had 254.5 million daily active users the week before his takeover in late November of last year.

Following the conference, X revised its daily active user count to 245 million daily active users, according to The Information. Before specifically saying X had 225 million active users, Yaccarinno previously cited "200 to 250 million" daily active users earlier in the interview.

However, even X's revised number of 245 million daily active users would still see X lose millions or around 3.7 percent of daily active users from before Musk's acquisition.

In fact, daily active users are even down from the numbers that Musk shared last year when he was in charge. According to the aforementioned Musk tweet, Twitter had 259.4 million daily active users in mid-November 2022. Compared to the daily active users Twitter was pulling late last year under Musk's leadership, X has shed nearly 15 million users – a drop of roughly 5.6 percent.

Twitter first started sharing this metric, which the company refers to as monetizable daily active users or mDAU, years before Musk even planned to buy the company. The reason? Twitter's daily active user numbers were reliably more favorable for the company than its other metrics when it shared its quarterly reports for investors and shareholders.

When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation, saying that X had between 200 and 250 daily active users. She then moved the discussion to the platform's Communities feature, the company's answer to Facebook Groups, saying X had 50,000 communities and that engagement numbers and time spent in those communities were up since June.

Along with the daily active user metrics, Yaccarino also shared that X now has a record 550 million monthly active users. This would be up from the 541 million "monthly users" metric that Musk shared in a post in July.

It's unclear, however, just how much of the monthly active user growth has happened under Musk when compared to how the company was doing prior to his takeover. That's because in 2019, Twitter stopped reporting this number in favor of the daily active user metric. The company entered that year with 321 million monthly active users, the last publicly reported monthly active user metric directly from Twitter.

It should be noted that Musk has shifted away from both the daily and monthly active user numbers in favor of "unregretted user minutes," a metric seemingly made-up by Musk.