Jack Smith has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the matter and to schedule oral arguments early this year. The high court should rule quickly before the election heats up. Trump also should be tried soon so voters know before the elections whether a candidate for the nation's highest public office violated laws in our constitution, democracy's most sacred document. Until those charges are settled, he should not be on the ballot. Being treated equally is a crucial principle of our democracy. The law says anyone who tries to overthrow the government should not hold high public office. Trump and his supporters must be shown that laws are not things they can obey when they feel like it. The rule of law should prevail. He should only be on the ballot once he and Jack Smith have their day in court.

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A recent Telegram post shows how easily the twin enemies of truth – deceit and propaganda – fill the gaps created by heavy-handed censorship of the media in a bloody, directionless war that has killed thousands of innocent people and displaced millions of others. If there’s a void in solid, professionally edited media, the Telegram post shows how purveyors of propaganda will rush to fill it. We will probably see much of the same thing in America as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway. To say that the post, titled 72 Virgins – Uncensored, is problematic is to state the obvious. Less well known to audiences around the world are the policies that make legitimate media vulnerable to the credibility gaps that make the propaganda pervasive.

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News coverage of the drama over Sam Altman’s ouster as CEO of OpenAI overshadows the most important question we should be asking about artificial intelligence: How can we oversee a technology expanding at the speed of light while the public’s still in the dark?  Ever since the board of OpenAi fired Altman on November seventeenth, media coverage focused on the corporate soap opera that prompted the decision to fire and then rehire Altman. Speculation dominated coverage of the company and its board until the New York Times recently published a definitive piece on Altman, exposing the backstabbing and deceit that prompted the board to act.

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Even this far away from the election, there are signs around the country that Trump’s influences are already affecting how the Republican Party will behave. Those Republicans who were loudly supportive of Trump’s election theft claim did not fare well in the midterm elections. But I don’t think they learned their lesson. His influence played out in the House Republican's stumbling effort to elect a new speaker, after tossing out the first one. Trump’s current theme is that Joe Biden is a threat to Democracy. Watch how that starts popping up all over as the campaign proceeds. Trump will be trying to offset the fact that he is the one formally accused of trying to stage a coup. Message echoing is a common tactic, and the man knows how to make echoes.

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Generative AI is a revolutionary technology that will change the world and is evolving at lightening speed. With the capitalists in charge, the speed of AI development will probably accelerate as will its offspring, ChatGPT. For-profit operations are nimbler and lure better talent to wrestle with evolving technologies with so much potential. I witnessed how seeking investors is much easier than asking for donations. There’s a downside to the capitalist approach, though. Dangling the prospects of huge profits on the horizon is a powerful incentive to diminish the importance of the social consequences of AI, which can be significant.

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I experience the war through the eyes of Marwan Athamneh who manages the Jerusalem bureau of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), where I am chairman of the board. Every day Athamneh monitors the conditions of MBN journalists in Gaza, the West Bank, the northern and southern borders of Israel and the conditions in Jerusalem, where tensions between Arab citizens of Israel and Israelis run high. When he can get to the office, Athamneh runs studios for Alhurra, the main MBN broadcast outlet that airs its reports in Arabic. He also struggles to keep up with the logistical needs of MBN war correspondents.  

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My Israeli friend and I enjoyed lunch and conversation on a sunny patio crammed with holiday tourists who had flocked to booths adjacent to the restaurant for a street fair where children could get face paints. I couldn’t imagine how the scene of such a joyous reunion would be shattered within days. We struggled to overcome the banter from nearby tables as we caught up on years past, on common friends and shared experiences. We took a short walk to her office before we bid a fond farewell. My Palestinian friend picked me up and drove me through a city he calls home and one I had visited often.

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Censorship and government control of the media characterize all markets Middle East Broadcasting Networks serve to one degree or another. In some places, breaking the rules set by government media officials can lead to time in a jail cell or even a death sentence. Dubai and the UAE, the confederation of Arab enclaves in which the city is located, are a bit different, though. You can say practically anything you want about anybody as long as the subject doesn’t involve the Sheikhs that control the place.

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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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