JIMMY CARTER, the former Georgia peanut farmer who as US president brokered a historic and lasting peace accord between Israel and Egypt in a single term marred by soaring inflation, an oil shortage and Iran’s holding of American hostages, has died. He was 100.

Mr. Carter died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family, the Carter Center said on Sunday in a statement. Public observances are planned in Atlanta and Washington, followed by a private interment in Plains.

The longest-living former US president ever, Mr. Carter had opted in early 2023 to spend his remaining time at his home in Plains receiving hospice care. He was there alongside Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years, when she died in November 2023 at age 96. And he lived long enough to fulfill a final wish — to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

A Democrat who rose from running his family’s peanut-farming and seed-supply businesses to serving as Georgia governor, Mr. Carter won the White House in 1976 over incumbent Gerald Ford by promising to bring honesty to an office tainted two years earlier by the resignation of Richard Nixon in the culmination of the Watergate scandal.

Ascetic, humble and deeply religious, Mr. Carter was skeptical of the pomp surrounding the presidency and came to Washington with fewer allies and fixed positions than most who hold the job.

His allegiance to an inner moral compass, his vow to support societies that “share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights” and his tendency to speak his mind collided at times with political realities during his four years in office, from 1977 to 1981, and served as a preview of what was to come in a service-filled post-presidency that lasted decades.

Mr. Carter “assembled a new front line on nearly every issue, with no inherited party game plan or ideological playbook to fall back on,” Jonathan Alter wrote in a 2020 biography that painted him as often right in his instincts but flawed in executing government responses. The book was among several in recent years that offered a revised and sunnier view of Mr. Carter’s crisis-plagued tenure.

Though Mr. Carter “left the White House a widely unpopular president,” his achievements “shine brighter over time, few more than his unique determination to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy from the start of his presidency,” his chief domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, wrote in a 2018 biography of his former boss.

STATE FUNERAL
In a statement on Sunday, President Joseph R. Biden eulogized Mr. Carter as “an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian” who touched the lives of people around the world with “his compassion and moral clarity.” Biden said he’ll be ordering a state funeral for Mr. Carter in Washington.

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who often brought up Mr. Carter’s presidency during this year’s election campaign to needle Mr. Biden, said Mr. Carter faced challenges at a pivotal time in US history. He “did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans,” Mr. Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

The signature achievement of the Carter presidency, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, led to peaceful co-existence between the Middle East neighbors even as it fell short of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

That and other foreign policy breakthroughs, including a treaty granting Panama ownership of the US-built Panama Canal, were overshadowed by the plight of American hostages held in Iran during the last 444 days of his presidency. They were finally released the day Mr. Carter turned over the Oval Office to Republican Ronald Reagan.

On the domestic front, the Mr. Carter presidency was dogged by economic woes. Inflation reached 13.3% at the end of 1979 compared with 5.2% when he took office in January 1977. The Federal Reserve’s actions to stem price increases pushed home-mortgage rates to almost 15%, and Mr. Carter had to take emergency action to stem a slide in the dollar. There were energy shortages, and oil prices more than doubled.

MALAISE SPEECH
A speech to the nation on July 15, 1979, became emblematic of Mr. Carter’s presidency.

With fuel prices skyrocketing and lines at gas stations lengthening, Mr. Carter told Americans that solving the energy mess “can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country.” He said many Americans “now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

Though Mr. Carter never uttered the word, the address became known as the “malaise” speech and contributed to a sense that Mr. Carter was powerless to change the nation’s course.

“Our memory of the speech comes from those who reworked it, who twisted its words into a blunt instrument that helped them depose a president,” historian Kevin Mattson wrote.

Mr. Carter’s words, he noted, “received immediate applause and yet wound up ensuring his defeat” to Mr. Reagan in the 1980 election.

Just weeks after delivering the speech, Mr. Carter tapped Paul Volcker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to take over as chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing G. William Miller, who became Treasury secretary. Mr. Volcker made it clear to Mr. Carter that he would deal head-on with inflation by pursuing tighter monetary policies than Mr. Miller. Mr. Volcker’s policies — which sent interest rates as high as 20% — came at a high price, the fallout contributing to Mr. Reagan’s landslide victory over Mr. Carter in the 1980 election.

Though some of Mr. Volcker’s policies “were politically costly, they were the right thing to do,” Mr. Carter commented upon Mr. Volcker’s death in 2019.

NOBEL PRIZE
Mr. Carter made some of his biggest imprints on the world in the years after he left the White House. He “reinvented the post-presidency,” observed Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University and a Carter biographer.

In four-plus decades as an ex-president — the longest such tenure in American history — Mr. Carter waged a worldwide campaign against war, disease and the suppression of human rights through the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which he founded with his wife. The center made particular strides against Guinea worm disease, a parasite spread through contaminated water that can render victims non-functional for months. Worldwide cases dropped to just 14 in 2023 from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986, according to the center.

Mr. Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

His post-presidential causes were not without backlash. Fourteen advisers to the Carter Center resigned in protest of his best-selling 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which compared Israel to the White governments of South Africa that systematically oppressed Black citizens.

Mr. Carter’s longevity defied the odds. He revealed in 2015 that he had melanoma, a type of cancer, and that it had spread to his brain. He received treatment, recovered and on March 22, 2019, became the longest-living chief executive in US history. In 2021, Jimmy and Rosalynn Mr. Carter celebrated their 75^th wedding anniversary.

His Christian faith, he said, made him “absolutely and completely at ease with death.” 

PEANUT FARM
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, the first of four children born to Earl Carter, a farmer, and the former Lillian Gordy, a nurse. He grew up in the nearby hamlet of Archery, where the family owned a peanut farm and a general store. He traveled two miles each day to Plains to attend an all-White school.

Electricity and indoor plumbing didn’t reach the Carter farm until 1935.

Mr. Carter attended the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, from 1943 to his graduation in 1946. He began dating a girl from Plains, Rosalynn Smith, when home on breaks. They married in July 1946 and would have four children — sons Jack, Chip and Jeff, and daughter Amy.

While serving in the Navy for seven years, Mr. Carter worked on the development of the nuclear submarine program and rose to the rank of lieutenant. When his father died in 1953, Mr. Carter resigned his commission to return to his family’s peanut-farming business.

In 1962, he was elected to the Georgia Senate and in 1970 was elected governor, having lost his first bid in 1966. His work to end racial discrimination in the state made him a symbol of the “New South.”

At the start of his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Carter was not widely known outside of Georgia and was viewed by analysts as a long shot for the Democratic nomination. He began traveling the country before many other candidates had started their campaigns, pitching his outsider status to voters who had endured the revelations of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation.

Mr. Carter emphasized his religious upbringing — he was a Southern Baptist who often described himself as a “born again” Christian — and promised the American people that he would never lie to them. He won the New Hampshire primary, proving his viability in the North, and defeated Alabama Governor George Wallace in Florida to establish himself as the strongest candidate in the South, on the way to clinching the Democratic nomination.

With Minnesota Democrat Walter Mondale as his running mate, Mr. Carter narrowly beat Mr. Ford, with 50.1% of the vote, and was sworn into office in January 1977 as the 39^th US president. Starting what has become a tradition for new presidents, he stepped out of his limousine during the inauguration parade and walked down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

BILLY BREW
Mr. Carter’s family included colorful characters such as his sister Ruth, a faith healer, and brother Billy, a gas station operator whose enjoyment of drinking led to the creation of the short-lived Billy Beer brand during his brother’s presidency.

The president’s mother also grabbed media attention. A nurse who tended to Black and White families in the segregated South, she joined the Peace Corps at age 68 and always had a ready quip for the press.

“When I look at my children,” she once cracked, “I say, ‘Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.’”

As president, Mr. Carter signed legislation creating the cabinet-level Department of Education. He appointed women, Black people and Hispanic people to federal posts in large numbers. He stunned the defense contracting industry by killing the Air Force’s expensive B-1 bomber project, a step later reversed by Mr. Reagan. He signed the law that created the federal Superfund program to clean up hazardous waste sites.

Mr. Carter won praise after his presidency for the steps he had taken toward deregulation, particularly of the airline industry, where the removal of government control of fares and routes promoted competition.

One of his longest battles with Congress involved his proposal to scrap 18 dam and irrigation projects, most of them in the West and South. His “hit list” pleased many environmentalists while angering Westerners, including some fellow Democrats. Congress restored funding for most of the projects.

From his presidency’s earliest days, Mr. Carter sought to highlight and utilize energy shortages to raise support for his domestic agenda. The cabinet-level Department of Energy was created in his administration’s first year, and he had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. In a televised address to the nation two weeks into his term, Mr. Carter called for a new emphasis on conservation, mirroring the White House’s own push for frugality.

At Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, Mr. Carter guided Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the 1978 accord that led the next year to the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country. The treaty committed Israel to remove its troops and civilian settlements from the Sinai Peninsula and led to billions of dollars in US aid to Israel and Egypt.

The Camp David breakthrough didn’t lead to a broader Mideast peace, however, and Mr. Carter through the years didn’t hide his disappointment. In Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, he focused on Israel’s occupation of Arab land as the root cause of continued hostilities.

In a 2010 book based on his White House diaries, Mr. Carter said the US had “defaulted in carrying out one unchallenged and unique responsibility: mediating a peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors.”

OLYMPICS BOYCOTT
In response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Mr. Carter imposed a trade embargo and organized the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Rosalynn Carter said she tried and failed to persuade her husband to wait until after the Iowa presidential caucuses of 1980 to impose the embargo, which hurt US farmers.

“I am much more political than Jimmy and was more concerned about popularity and winning reelection,” Rosalynn wrote in her 1984 memoir, “but I have to say that he had the courage to tackle the important issues, no matter how controversial — or politically damaging — they might be.”

The biggest external crisis of his presidency was precipitated by the Islamic Revolution in Iran that overthrew the shah and installed a theocratic government headed by formerly exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

On Nov. 4, 1979, radical students overran the US Embassy in Tehran and took more than 60 Americans hostage. Fifty-two of them were held for the last 444 days of Mr. Carter’s term.

In April 1980, Mr. Carter gave the go-ahead for a military assault on the embassy to rescue the hostages. Of the eight helicopters from the USS Nimitz that headed to a desert staging area, from which the raid on Tehran was to commence, three had problems. The mission was aborted, and during preparations for retreat, a helicopter flew into a C-130 transport plane and exploded. Eight American servicemen died.

Stymied by crisis on the domestic and foreign fronts, Mr. Carter lost his bid for reelection in a landslide, with Mr. Reagan winning 44 states. The hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, the day Mr. Reagan was sworn into office.

ONE MORE HELICOPTER
“Over the years, in various classrooms and public forums, I have often been asked if there was one substantive action or decision I made as president that I would have changed,” Mr. Carter wrote in White House Diary. “Somewhat facetiously, I have answered, ‘I would have sent one more helicopter to ensure the success of the hostage rescue effort in April 1980.’ But I truly believe that if I had done so, I would have been reelected.”

The Carters returned to Plains after leaving the White House, and Mr. Carter taught scripture at the Maranatha Baptist Church as recently as 2020.

In his brimming post-presidency, Mr. Carter helped arrange peace talks between North and South Korea and a cease-fire in Bosnia. Through the Carter Center, he helped monitor elections around the world to help ensure that they were fair. He traveled to Haiti in 1994 to negotiate the restoration of constitutional government, averting a threatened US-led invasion.

Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, as the US under President George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq, Mr. Carter made his disapproval clear. “For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventive war may well set an example that can have catastrophic consequences,” he said.

Mr. Carter attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the sixth and final presidential swearing-in he witnessed after leaving office. Days earlier, he had told congregants at his hometown church that of 22 voters in his family, none had voted for Mr. Trump. But he had been the first former president to accept an invitation to the inauguration, determined to show support for the new US leader.

Mr. Trump “has never been involved in politics before,” Carter explained, according to an account by Voice of America. “He has a lot to learn. He’ll learn — sometimes the hard way, like I did.” — Bloomberg

INVESTIGATORS probing the cause of the worst civil aviation accident ever in South Korea will focus on a bird strike and the unusual landing-gear failure in the final moments of the fateful flight that left all but two of the 181 occupants of the Boeing Co. 737 jet dead.

The 737-800 aircraft operated by Jeju Air Co. crashed at Muan International Airport on Sunday morning, skidding along the runway on its belly before smashing into a wall, where it exploded into a ball of fire. Only a pair of flight attendants survived.

While the aircraft was almost entirely destroyed, investigators will have valuable data to work with as they reconstruct the event. One vital key will be a readout of the two flight recorders, which were already pulled from the wreckage, though one device is damaged and may need longer to analyze.

Then there’s footage showing the aircraft during approach with one engine apparently flaming out, alongside videos of the plane coming into the airport and sliding along the runway at high speed, appearing largely intact, before the impact with the embankment.

In another incident on Monday, a Jeju Air plane returned safely to South Korea’s Gimpo Airport after it was found to have a problem with the landing gear immediately after takeoff, Yonhap News reported. South Korean authorities will launch a special inspection into all of the 101 Boeing 737-800 planes operating in the country, while asking Boeing and the maker of the engine to join the investigation.

They will also probe other factors, such as whether the airliner’s personnel followed safety manuals properly, the airport’s measures to prevent bird strikes and if the plane’s power system was shut down before the crash, transport ministry officials said at a briefing Monday.

They will also look into whether the so-called localizer, an instrument set to guide the landing of the plane, had any relevance to the crash.

Shares of Jeju Air declined as much as 16% to a record low in Seoul trading on Monday, while parent AK Holdings, Inc. fell 12%.

The accident poses several unusual mysteries, and investigators have said it’s too soon to speculate what may have caused the crash. Mid-air bird strikes are rare but not entirely uncommon and seldom deadly because aircraft can operate on one engine for some time. Why the landing gear didn’t deploy also remains unclear, or indeed if there’s a link between that malfunction and the bird strike that was discussed between the cockpit and control tower just before the landing.

The pilot, considered an experienced captain with close to 7,000 hours of active duty, issued a mayday emergency call minutes after the control tower warned of a bird strike. He aborted his first landing, started a go-around and switched direction on the runway in his second attempt. The control tower granted clearance to land in the opposite direction, and officials said it’s unlikely that the runway length caused the crash.

The pilot didn’t seem to have sufficient time to try alternative measures such as dumping fuel, a transport ministry official said at Monday’s briefing.

The Boeing 737 involved in the crash is a predecessor to the latest Max variant. It’s considered a reliable workhorse that passed routine maintenance checks, in a country with deep expertise for aircraft servicing. Around the world, there are more than 4,000 planes of this type in service.

Even if one of the black boxes was damaged in the crash, the data storage units can often be reconstructed to aid the investigation. The fortified devices contain vital statistics and performance metrics of a flight, as well as taped conversations and sounds from the cockpit.

Muan’s control tower warned of the risk of a bird strike at 8:57 a.m. local time, about two minutes before the pilot declared an emergency, officials said. The airport had four staffers working to prevent bird strikes at the time of the crash, including one outside the tower.

Birds are an aviation hazard because they can be ingested into the turbine or damage other parts of the plane and cause engine failure. In 2009, an Airbus A320 landed in the Hudson River in New York after a bird strike damaged both engines, in what has become known as the “Miracle on the Hudson” because everyone on board survived.

Jeju Air’s 15-year-old plane, registered HL8088, entered service with the carrier in 2017. It was initially delivered in 2009 to Irish discount airline Ryanair Holdings Plc, according to the Planespotters.net database. The jet was configured to seat as many as 189 passengers. Founded in 2005, Jeju Air operates 42 aircraft, according to its website.

There was no sign of malfunction during regular maintenance checks, Jeju Air Chief Executive Officer Kim E-Bae said at a news briefing. The jet was returning from Bangkok — a 4 1/2 hour flight. The plane, which YTN said had been chartered by a local travel agency for a Christmas holiday trip, earlier left Muan for the Thai capital on Saturday evening.

Muan is a small regional airport located in the country’s south that opened in 2007. It was built to help connect cities including Gwangju and Mokpo and increased its regular service of international flights this year, including those of Jeju Air.

The two surviving flight attendants were taken to the hospital, and one of the two survivors is in the intensive care unit with a thoracic spine fracture, the doctor at the hospital said in a press briefing.

Boeing said it’s in contact with Jeju Air and ready to offer support. Aircraft manufacturers typically send specialists to crash sites to aid an investigation. Recovery of the victims, some of whom were ejected from the aircraft after the impact, has been completed and salvage crews are now searching the wreckage for passengers’ belongings, Yonhap said.

More than 1,500 people including police, military, coast guard and local government personnel are assisting at the crash site, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. The airport’s runway will remain closed in the coming days.

The accident is the deadliest passenger airline disaster in South Korea, surpassing an Air China plane crash near Busan in 2002 that killed 129 people, according to the Aviation Safety Network. The crash is also among the worst globally this decade.

South Korea is currently experiencing a deepening political crisis after its president provoked public outrage by briefly imposing martial law earlier this month. Acting President Choi Sang-mok declared a week of mourning.

The crash is the second major air disaster in less than a week. An incident in Russian airspace led to the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger aircraft on Dec. 25, killing dozens.

After a year of not a single fatal accident among the 37 million commercial aircraft movements in 2023, this year has seen a rising number of cases. Early in January, an approaching Japan Airlines Co. Airbus A350 crashed into a small plane on a runway in Tokyo, killing five occupants in the stationary aircraft.

A few days later, a door plug blew out of an airborne Boeing 737 Max 9 flying in the US. Though nobody was killed in that accident, the episode threw the US planemaker into deep crisis because it exposed sloppy workmanship at the company.

In August, a smaller ATR turboprop plane operated by Brazil’s VoePass crashed near Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport, killing 58 passengers and four crew members. — Bloomberg

FOR THE WINNER of a $1.26-billion Mega Millions jackpot ticket sold in California, the ecstasy of the big win may soon give way to the anxiety over some big choices.

“This is a life-changing moment and they don’t need to make every decision right away,” said Matthew Liebman, chief executive officer and founding partner of Amplius Wealth Advisors.

Mr. Liebman’s first advice was to build strong relationships with four different advisers: a wealth adviser, a tax accountant, an estate attorney and a therapist before making any decision about payout.

Friday’s jackpot was the fifth-largest Mega Millions prize in US history and the winning ticket was sold at Sunshine Food and Gas in Cottonwood, a census designated area with a population of about 6,000 people, in Shasta County, about 150 miles (241.4 kilometers) north of Sacramento. The identity of the winner (or winners) wasn’t immediately known.

While most lottery grand prize winners typically chose the cash payout, which in this case will be about $571.9 million, financial planners still say there’s reason to opt for the annuity — distributed over 30 annual payments.

“The annuity typically is a bigger payout,” said Anthony Love, managing director of tax and trust at Quotient Wealth Partners. If the winner is young and healthy, it’s probably a better option, he advised. Those who take the annuity can also avoid the potential pitfall of watching their earnings evaporate through bad investments or other financial decisions.

If the winner is older, the lump sum may be the better choice, Mr. Love said. “If you accept the lump sum, you get all the money at one time, you get to invest the money however you want it to be invested, and you’re paying tax at a time where the effective tax rate is the lowest in a generation,” he said.

Massive lottery prizes in the US have become increasingly common in recent years, attributed to changes in game rules and higher ticket prices. Since 2016, more than 10 jackpots have exceeded $1 billion, including three in 2024 alone.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has also had some well-considered advice for lottery winners. He told the Dallas Morning News in 2016 that winners should hire a tax attorney, avoid taking the lump sum and say no to friends and relatives who ask for money. Having a lot of money won’t instantly make you a good investor, so winners should also put money in the bank and keep it safe, he said.

Mr. Liebman, of Amplius Wealth Advisors, also advised the winning ticket holder to take a deep breath.

“I say that seriously because, from what I have understood from past lottery winners, is that it can be a big strain on their mental health,” he said.

The last Mega Millions jackpot win happened in September, when a ticket claimed an $810-million prize. The record-setting Mega Millions jackpot of $1.58 billion was won in Florida in August 2023. Only three larger jackpots, all from Powerball, have surpassed that amount. — Bloomberg