Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter still spends much of his time injecting himself into the nastiest spats on the planet. But most Sundays, the 83-year-old former president manages to be back here in the tiny city where he was raised. He does not like to skip Sunday school. He gives his Bible lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church, an unassuming red-brick chapel on the outskirts of town. Carter estimates that he has given more than 450 of them since leaving the White House in 1981.

The Israeli and Palestinian leaders held surprise talks Sunday, as former President Carter received a cool reception in Israel on a Mideast visit that includes plans to meet with Khaled Meshaal, the political head of Hamas. An Israeli official said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert -- who sat down together just a week ago -- would coordinate peace moves before Abbas travels to the U.S., where he is to meet with President Bush on April 23.

A dispute erupted Monday over the lack of Israeli secret service protection for former President Carter as he visited this border town and called rocket attacks by Palestinian militants "a despicable crime" that he hoped a cease-fire would halt. Carter's planned talks with the leader of the militant group Hamas and a book he published in 2006 that called Israeli policy in occupied Palestinian territories "a system of apartheid" have caused official displeasure in Israel.

Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday criticized former President Carter for planning to meet with leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas as he tried to reassure Jewish voters that his candidacy isn't a threat to them or U.S. support for Israel. The Democratic presidential candidate's comments to a group of Jewish leaders were his first on Carter's controversial meeting scheduled this week in Egypt. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen.

Former President Carter wrapped up his controversial Middle East tour Monday with an upbeat account of the militant Hamas movement's position on Israel, but with no apparent progress in promoting a cease-fire or bringing the Islamic group into peace efforts. Hamas turned down Carter's proposals for a one-month suspension of rocket attacks on Israel and a rapid prisoner exchange that would have transferred a captive Israeli soldier to Egypt. Israeli and U.S.

Former President Jimmy Carter on Monday said Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis was far worse than he could have imagined and expressed dismay that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his government refused to acknowledge the problem even existed. "The entire basic structure in education, healthcare, feeding people, social services and sanitation has broken down," Carter said at a news conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Fourteen members of an advisory board to President Carter's human rights organization resigned Thursday to protest his new book, which has been attacked as unfairly critical of Israel and riddled with inaccuracies. The resignations at the Carter Center are the latest backlash against the book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," which has drawn fire from Jewish groups and fellow Democrats, and led to the resignation last month of Kenneth W. Stein, a center fellow and a longtime Carter advisor.

A former executive director of the Carter Center whose resignation from the institution has been a focal point of the furor over former President Jimmy Carter's new Middle East book said his decision to step down was a matter of "intellectual honesty." In his first detailed public comments since his resignation last month, Kenneth W.

In 25 years of interviews with his hometown paper that could only be released upon his death, former President Ford once called Jimmy Carter a "disaster" who ranked alongside Warren Harding, and said Ronald Reagan received far too much credit for ending the Cold War. "It makes me very irritated when Reagan's people pound their chests and say that because we had this big military buildup, the Kremlin collapsed," Ford told the Grand Rapids Press.

Former President Carter defended his controversial book at a predominantly Jewish university, telling the audience that his goal was to revive Middle East peace talks and that attacks on his character had hurt him and his family. Jewish groups have expressed outrage at "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," arguing that its comparison of Israel's treatment of Palestinians to South Africa's reviled system of racial segregation could undermine perceptions of Israel's legitimacy.