JERUSALEM: The first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war have been the deadliest recorded for journalists, with the most journalists killed in a single year in one location, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said on Thursday.
Most of the journalists and media workers killed in the war — 61 out of 68 — were Palestinian. The report said it was “particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military.”
A spokesperson for Israel’s military has said the forces don’t target journalists.
Four Israeli and three Lebanese journalists, including Reuters visuals journalist Issam Abdallah, were also killed between Oct. 7 and Dec. 20, CPJ data showed.
The group, a nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, said it was further investigating the circumstances of all journalist deaths. It said such efforts in Gaza were hampered by widespread destruction and by the killing of journalists’ family members, who typically serve as sources for investigators looking into how the journalists died.
Reporting in Gaza has been severely restricted under intense Israeli bombardment, with repeated communications blackouts and a lack of food, fuel and housing, said CPJ, adding that foreign journalists have not been able to independently access the strip for most of the war.
“The Israel-Gaza war is the most dangerous situation for journalists we have ever seen, and these figures show that clearly,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “The Israeli army has killed more journalists in 10 weeks than any other army or entity has in any single year. And with every journalist killed, the war becomes harder to document and to understand.”
A May report by CPJ found that Israeli soldiers had killed at least 20 journalists in the last 22 years and none had ever been charged or held accountable.
Earlier this month, a Reuters investigation found an Israeli tank crew killed Abdallah and wounded six reporters in Lebanon on Oct. 13 by firing two shells in quick succession from Israel while the journalists were filming cross-border shelling.
At least 1,200 people were killed in Israel and 240 were taken hostage on Oct. 7 after Hamas launched a surprise attack, according to Israeli tallies. Gaza health officials say nearly 20,000 Palestinians have since been confirmed killed in Israeli strikes, with thousands more believed lost under rubble.
Gaza war ‘most dangerous ever’ for journalists, says rights group
https://arab.news/5uymq
Gaza war ‘most dangerous ever’ for journalists, says rights group
- 61 out of 68 journalists killed during the conflict are Palestinians
- CPJ is said to be concerned about an “apparent pattern” of targeting journalists and their families
Microsoft wants AI ‘agents’ to work together and remember things
- Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own
- Microsoft is trying to help AI agents have better memories of things that users have asked them to do: Exec
REDMOND, Washington: Microsoft envisions a future where any company’s artificial intelligence agents can work together with agents from other firms and have better memories of their interactions, its chief technologist said on Sunday ahead of the company’s annual software developer conference.
Microsoft is holding its Build conference in Seattle on May 19, where analysts expect the company to unveil its latest tools for developers building AI systems.
Speaking at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, ahead of the conference, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told reporters and analysts the company is focused on helping spur the adoption of standards across the technology industry that will let agents from different makers collaborate. Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own.
Scott said that Microsoft is backing a technology called Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source protocol introduced by Google-backed Anthropic. Scott said MCP has the potential to create an “agentic web” similar to the way hypertext protocols that helped spread the Internet in the 1990s.
“It means that your imagination gets to drive what the agentic web becomes, not just a handful of companies that happen to see some of these problems first,” Scott said.
Scott also said that Microsoft is trying to help AI agents have better memories of things that users have asked them to do, noting that, so far, “most of what we’re building feels very transactional.”
But making an AI agent’s memory better costs a lot of money because it requires more computing power. Microsoft is focusing on a new approach called structured retrieval augmentation, where an agent extracts short bits of each turn in a conversation with a user, creating a roadmap to what was discussed.
“This is a core part of how you train a biological brain — you don’t brute force everything in your head every time you need to solve a particular problem,” Scott said.
‘It’s a no-brainer to go where the progress is,’ Fortune editor-in-chief tells Arab News ahead of Riyadh summit on women in business
- Alyson Shontell finds Kingdom’ Vision 2030 transformation “remarkable,” so the magazine wants to see it for itself and show it to the world
- The CCO says aim is to build a global network through which women in the Middle East feel connected to women in other parts of the world
RIYADH: The Fortune Most Powerful Women franchise, which includes an annual list of the 100 Most Powerful Women, began in 1998. Now, nearly three decades on, the publication is entering the Middle East region with the Fortune Most Powerful Women International conference in Riyadh on May 20 and 21.
“More and more women were getting into the upper ranks of business,” and “we wanted to be on the ground covering it,” said Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and chief content officer of Fortune.
“There’s no more exciting place for us to be right now (than Saudi Arabia) covering the world of business and women’s progress,” she added.
Despite reforms and transformation in the region, some still view it as a place with restricted freedom for women and media. However, Shontell is “excited to go in judgment-free,” and connect with women in the region and “show what they’re doing to the world,” she said.
The transformation in the Kingdom since Vision 2030 has been “remarkable” and, she added, “we want to see it for ourselves and show it to the world.
“It’s a no-brainer to go where the progress is: the Middle East.”
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Fortune’s ambition is “to connect global power and the biggest businesses in the world,” and so “we would love to build the most powerful women’s network into a global network,” through which women in the Middle East feel connected to women in other parts of the world, she explained.
This year, 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies are run by women, which is the highest number it has ever been, Shontell said.
There is still a long way ahead before gender equality is reached in businesses, but “that’s a big reason why we think it’s still important to show the changing evolution of power,” she said.
Last year, Fortune also published a Most Powerful People list — “to recognize powerful people as powerful people” — and that list was dominated by men.
“That’s how the world is, and we’re not going to pretend that it’s otherwise,” Shontell said, adding that it is part of Fortune’s mission to track progress, present the world as it is, and when there are changes, to showcase them as well.
At the beginning of this year, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his second day in office calling titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”
He has issued multiple orders since then aimed at rolling back the diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) policies of major corporations, foundations, non-profits, educational institutions and even the government.
One order, which deems DEI policies “illegal,” suggests that these policies are a “guise” for “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”
The directives have raised several concerns, some around women’s participation in the workforce.
Shontell, however, remains optimistic. “There’s a pretty strong commitment from women in the United States,” she said.
“We have made a lot of progress over the last 50 years here, and I don’t think many people would like to see that backslide.”
Shontell herself has been part of that commitment. She joined Business Insider in 2008, as the company’s sixth employee going on to become editor-in-chief in 2016.
When she was appointed as editor-in-chief at Fortune in 2021, she became the youngest and only woman to serve in that role in the company’s 95 years.
“When you think of who the editor-in-chief of Fortune, or even Business Insider, is, you don’t think of a young woman,” Shontell said.
To illustrate her point, she said that even if one asked AI what it thought the editor of a business magazine looks like, it would draw up someone like JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon.
And she was right. We asked Meta AI and ChatGPT: “Can you generate an image of the editor-in-chief of a major global business publication?” The former gave us four images: one of a woman and three of men, while the latter gave a single image featuring a man
The most common reaction Shontell receives is surprise. But she doesn’t mind. Rather, she likes surprising people and the feeling that “no one sees you coming.”
It “kind of gives you something to work toward something to be extra proud of when you achieve it,” she said.
For Shontell, the industry has been nothing but change since she stepped into it, which was well after the days of leisurely business lunches and thick magazines, she says.
“A lot of the trends that we’re seeing now are just completely different than they were before,” and much of the conversation in the newsroom is around future-proofing the company, she said.
The key, according to her, is a flexible team and the knack to recognize trends and understand which ones are here to stay.
When she was at Business Insider, her goal was to get everyone to read it. Fortune, on the other hand, is not about scale.
“My goal is to continue to up our relevance and to broaden the audience just a little bit, but to keep it very much thought leadership,” she said.
Shontell explained that it is hard to run a company in a fast-changing and unpredictable world, and so, the question is: “How can we be the best asset for this global leadership reader?”
The aim is to “give them the information they need to do their jobs through the best of their abilities, so that the rest of us can all benefit from them making better decisions.”
Fortune was relatively slow to embrace digital media with its website only launching in 2014.
By the end of 2024, it had 24 million global users, and its social channels have a total of 7 million followers.
Still, not many younger audiences are aware of the brand or consume its content. Shontell admits that while Fortune has been very good at reaching C-suite audiences, “we have increasingly been bad at reaching the next generation and pulling them up through their career path.”
But now, with social media, she says “we have permission to show up differently on different platforms” to reach a potential reader.
That means speaking in a different tone of voice perhaps to reach GenZs and millennials on platforms like TikTok, which would be “their first experience with us,” she said.
It is a “delicate balance” of “how do you get that next gen reader so that Fortune will continue to exist and be read and widely known in 20 years, and how do you maintain that thought leadership at the same time?”
As part of this effort, Fortune is reinventing its video offering this year and launching podcasts.
Artificial intelligence is at the core of technology and any conversation about it, and undoubtedly is an “incredibly powerful tool,” said Shontell.
Despite the dangers of AI — fake news, misinformation, deepfakes — and concerns about potential job losses, Shontell believes AI will bring journalism back to its roots.
Any news or information that can be rounded up and aggregated does not need humans and will be done by AI, but that is an “exciting opportunity, because it will bring journalism back to its core roots of seeking original information and facts and bringing it to readers first with the best analysis (and) the best new information that you can get,” she said.
Shontell says that in the last decade or so, the news media industry has almost lost its way, partly because the business model is predicated on cutting through noise and grabbing attention, instead of delivering news in a way that is aligned with the news company’s specific approach.
There will be “hard change,” and news firms can either be a big publication with scale and a “solid” business model like The New York Times or Bloomberg, or a smaller, niche publication; anything in the “messy middle” will have a difficult time, she said.
Photo group says it has ‘suspended attribution’ of historic Vietnam picture because of doubts
- World Press Photo honored AP’s Nick Ut with its ” photo of the year ” in 1973
- Picture of girl running from a napalm attack became an iconic symbol of the war’s tragedy
An organization that honored The Associated Press’ Nick Ut with its ” photo of the year ” in 1973 for a picture of a girl running from a napalm attack in the Vietnam War says it has “suspended its attribution” to Ut because of doubts over who actually took it.
World Press Photo’s report Friday adds to the muddle over an issue that has split the photographic community since a movie earlier this year, “The Stringer,” questioned Ut’s authorship. The photo of a naked and terrified Kim Phuc became an iconic symbol of the war’s tragedy.
After two investigations, The Associated Press said it found no definitive evidence to warrant stripping Ut’s photo credit. The AP said it was possible Ut took the picture, but the passage of time made it impossible to fully prove, and could find no evidence to prove anyone else did.
World Press Photo said its probe found that two other photographers — Nguyen Thanh Nghe, the man mentioned in “The Stringer,” and Huynh Cong Phuc — “may have been better positioned” to take the shot.
“We conclude that the level of doubt is too significant to maintain the existing attribution,” said Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of World Press Photo. “At the same time, lacking conclusive evidence pointing definitively to another photographer, we cannot reassign authorship, either.”
World Press Photo, an organization whose awards are considered influential in photography, won’t attempt to recover the cash award given to Ut, a spokeswoman said.
Ut’s lawyer, James Hornstein, said his client hadn’t spoken to World Press Photo after some initial contact before “The Stringer” was released. “It seems they had already made up their mind to punish Nick Ut from the start,” he said.
Gary Knight, a producer of “The Stringer,” is a four-time judge of the World Press Photo awards and a consultant to the World Press Photo Foundation.
The AP said Friday that its standards “require proof and certainty to remove a credit and we have found that it is impossible to prove exactly what happened that day on the road or in the (AP) bureau over 50 years ago.”
“We understand World Press Photo has taken different action based on the same available information, and that is their prerogative,” the statement said. “There is no question over AP’s ownership of the photo.”
Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize that Ut won for the photo appears safe. The Pulitzers depend on news agencies who enter the awards to determine authorship, and administrator Marjorie Miller — a former AP senior editor — pointed to the AP’s study showing insufficient proof to withdraw credit. “The board does not anticipate future action at this time,” she said Friday.
Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’
- xAI blames employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic”
- Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said an “unauthorized modification” to its chatbot Grok was the reason why it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” on social media this week.
An employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said in an explanation posted late Thursday that promised reforms.
A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself before the fixes were made Wednesday, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group that came after Trump suspended refugee programs and halted arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression by the Afrikaner-led apartheid government that ruled South Africa until 1994. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on the software development site GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”
Among the instructions to Grok shown on GitHub on Thursday were: “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.”
Noting that some had “circumvented” its existing code review process, xAI also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.
Trump says journalist Austin Tice has not been seen in many years
- The US journalist was abducted in Syria in 2012 while reporting in Damascus on the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE: US President Donald Trump said on Friday that American journalist Austin Tice, captured in Syria more than 12 years ago, has not been seen in years.
Trump was asked if he brought up Tice when he met with Syria’s new President Ahmed Al-Sharaa during a visit to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.
“I always talk about Austin Tice. Now you know Austin Tice hasn’t been seen in many, many years,” Trump replied. “He’s got a great mother who’s just working so hard to find her boy. So I understand it, but Austin has not been seen in many, many years.”
Tice, a former US Marine and a freelance journalist, was 31 when he was abducted in August 2012 while reporting in Damascus on the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad, who was ousted by Syrian rebels who seized the capital Damascus in December. Syria had denied he was being held.
US officials pressed for Tice’s release after the government fell. Former President Joe Biden said at the time he believed Tice was alive.
