I spent time with Tharwat Shagrah just days before war broke out in Israel when Hamas, a militant group, unleashed its savage attack, killing hundreds of innocent people leading Israel to pulverize Hamas’s base in retaliation. The brutality that Hamas executed in the deadly exchanges in the Gaza Strip deserves the international condemnation it generated. But the violence also overshadows the legitimate Palestinian grievances that Tharwat deals with every day on her West Bank news beat. Indeed, Israel’s callous treatment of West Bank Palestinians is at the heart of the long-simmering conflict.

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Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel isn’t the only thing on the minds of Lebanese people. They are struggling with political chaos orchestrated by a militant political movement that seems more interested in helping stage attacks on Israel than dealing with a wrenching economic crisis at home. Nothing symbolizes the frustrations voiced to me here in Beirut more than the gaping hole in the center of the city’s downtown where the world’s largest non-nuclear explosion destroyed tie city’s port and reduced much of Beirut to ash.

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Erbil occupies a strategic geographical hot spot that borders Iran on the east, Turkey on the north, Syria to the west and Iraq to the south. As solid an ally as America will get in the region, Kurdistan’s soldiers, known as the peshmerga, helped repel ISIS forcers in Iraq after the terrorist group’s surprise and bloody drive to within thirty miles of Baghdad in 2014. I first traveled to the Kurdish region as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune nearly thirty years ago. At the time, I felt I had stepped back into biblical times.

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One of the first women the CFPA had helped was Omaima Zaki, a victim of a “blank check” scheme. Zaki, who was pregnant at the time, filled out a check that had been given her so she could raise $500. “She didn’t know what she was doing,” Hassan said. “She had never filled out a check and didn’t realize she had taken out a loan with interest. When Zaki couldn’t repay the loan, Emad Hannazy, said a loan shark filed charges of default against her in a local Egyptian court. She was sentenced to seven years in prison.

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All cities have trash problems, some worse than Tunis. But Saied’s government compounds the problems with polices that are designed to make Tunisia Europe’s trash bin, according to investigations by Alhurra, an Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) broadcast outlet, and others. “At times,” Hussein Elrazzaz said, “the debris ends up being dumped into the Mediterranean Sea. Trash is becoming as big a business as human trafficking.”

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I’ve watched Federal Reserve policy for years both as a newspaper reporter and editor, including a stint as the chief economic correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Washington D.C. Reporters develop a sense of when things are not going well and, right now, I feel in my bones that the Federal Reserve should ease off, or even ponder a reversal of the rate increases that I think are starting to slow the economy more than the economic data suggests.

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More than thirty years after the late Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker ratcheted up interest rates to fight inflation, Jay Powell adopted his playbook. He’s jacked up interest rates eleven times since March 2022, including the one expected to be announced on July 26th as the central bank struggles to restrain an inflation rate that had reached nine percent. But he’s still a base short of matching Volcker’s home run.

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I’m convinced that the gravest threat America faces is the ability of a minority in a political party to rig the system and thwart the will of the majority, just as a wing of the Republican Party nearly did when the recent threat to default on the nation’s debt, something Americans strongly opposed. In staging their rebellion against their own party, a small wing of the Republican rebels employed devious practice that subvert democracy.

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There’s nothing like travel to give you some perspective on the issues that fill our headlines and news broadcasts, including the story that intruded on our otherwise pleasant trip: the breathless media coverage of the federal charges filed against former President Donald Trump.

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To most Americans, AI is a new and potentially dangerous technology that burst on to the scene last November when OpenAI, a San Francisco based company, unveiled a version of ChatGPT that could perform many tasks, such as writing a blog item like this, better than humans. I’m writing this, by the way, not ChatGPT. 

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In contrast to the stories of young entrepreneurs who create digital magic with sites like TikTok, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir embodies the passion and commitment needed in the existential fight for the survival of local public service journalism. There’s no guarantee that he or anyone else will win the fight. In fact, the prospects for the future are rather grim. Nevertheless, the witty and wise-cracking Ó Muilleoir refuses to cave in.

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The incredibly powerful technology, ChatGPT, may write plays like Shakespeare and pass the legal bar exam, but it does a pathetic job at reporting, which is the heartbeat of journalism. Looking up property tax records is a job as basic to a reporter as a notebook. You’d think that it would be easy for a powerful and sophisticated technological program like ChatGPT, but it flunked my test.

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AI’s vulnerability to misinformation creates a crucial and growing need for skeptical, independent journalists. AI and its technological cousins could provide new tools for journalists to fill this need more effectively, efficiently, and better than ever if journalists embrace it and don’t react the way many initially did to the introduction of the Internet.

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Trump should get his day in court. He is, after all, the first ex-president to be indicted. What gives me pause are fears that other important news stories will be overshadowed by the flood of media attention that will inevitably flow Trump’s way. Get ready for monotonous TV camera shots of the New York courthouse where Trump will be arraigned and breathless babble from broadcast news stars. The stories I’m more interested in are Chicago’s mayor’s race and the election of a Supreme Court Justice in Wisconsin.

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Since Tyshawn Lee’s murder in November 2015, at least 600 other children under the age of seventeen have been killed by guns in Chicago. The violence is relentless; it happens in Chicago almost every weekend. Nationwide, we average 1,839 kids killed by guns every year. I feel horrible for the victims and families in Nashville. But the tragedies around the country are starting to seem numbingly like one more weekend on the South and West sides of Chicago.

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The anticipated indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a grandstanding stunt by a politically ambitious New Yorker that plays right into the hands of another New York politician now living on the east coast of Florida, the mecca of GOP royalty. This is the wrong case at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. 

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An interesting issue is what will the profit seeking hedge funds and newspaper chains do if they adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning? Journalists need a way to work on their own, not for companies like Gannett. AI systems and machine learning could blaze that trail. Richard Boyd says the nation’s best hope is to figure out a way to arm individual reporters with machine learning and artificial intelligence systems that have common goals with journalists.

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One of the great values journalists bring to the news is editing or curating in the lingo of the online world. Seasoned professionals in newsrooms around the world spend their days doing something that I don’t have the time to do: Reading all the news and using journalistic judgment to shape what’s important and what’s not.

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AI systems unquestionably carry profound implications for journalism, but they are even more sweeping for the world at large. In one form or another, many individual and businesses already use artificial intelligence techniques for tasks that once employed humans in field ranging from finance to health care. More change is coming, though, faster and sooner than most people realize.

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It would be nice if reporters focused on the negative impact of celebrity on politics. But our news shows seem inundated with political operatives who masquerade as journalists, all in hot pursuit of the TV camera and name recognition in case they get another shot at grabbing the brass ring. We are saturated with people whose only goal in life seems to be fame. I had my fifteen minutes and I hated it.

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