ANTIBES, France — No train ride I remember beats the Ouagadougou Choo-Choo from Abidjan, the seaside Ivory Coast capital, up through stunning storybook Africa into the color-splashed, spice-scented heart of Burkina Faso.

We lurched to a halt in pitch-dark Sahel desert. No one had mentioned that rains washed out 50 miles of track weeks earlier. Passengers crammed onto a rickety bus, armed only with mosquito spray in case of trouble down the line.

As dawn broke, we bounced down a rutted road laughing, sharing our last food and singing along with Bob Marley to the driver’s boombox: “I shot the sheriff.” That was 1986. The train is fancier now, but I don’t advise taking it — especially if you’re a sheriff.

Upheaval in the Sahel and civil war in Sudan are as significant to the wider world as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the long term, likely more. Why that sounds surprising is the root of the problem. News coverage is largely scattershot and at a distance.

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AMALFI, Italy — “Climate change,” finally a hot topic after decades of ignored warnings, is easier to grasp if you humanize it. Take Belle, a lovable toddler who lives in Boston.

Belle, not yet a year old, didn’t say much when I interviewed her poolside on the Amalfi coast. But her dad advises banks on climate risks; her mom is a skilled communicator. Their generation can shape a livable world for her own kids. Or not.

Unless many more correspondents across the world call bullshit on inept leaders and keep a hard focus on governments that fail to act, Belle’s prospects for the future amount to a popsicle’s chance on a car hood in Phoenix.

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TOURTOUR, France — Bastille Day hit me hard this year. Beyond the usual clash of French symbols and bleu-blanc-rouge banners, I felt a renewed surge of faith in the human spirit. But also, a foreboding sense of the opposite.

I’ve taken a break to rethink Mort Reports. New generations must fix the mess we old guys have made, but we need to listen to each other. A better future demands a grasp on what went wrong — and why. This is drop-dead urgent.

PARIS – Like so many others, I followed a pulse-pounding TV drama: backbiting jackals fought for control of a bedrock American news network they intended to pervert for political clout and power trips. Meantime, I also watched the finale of “Succession.”

After that town-hall “interview” last month, Robert Reich posed the key question: “Why in hell did CNN give Donald Trump a full hour of prime-time television before an audience of ardent supporters who applauded every lie and laughed at every sexist insult?”

Because “optics” muscles aside substance. News costs a lot to gather so replacing it with smoke and circus boosts profit. CNN is only one flagrant example of why Americans are largely blind to an overheated world in which despots and oligarchs are fast quashing their cherished values.

Ted Turner’s CNN began with a barebones Atlanta studio in 1980, at first so quirky it was dubbed Chicken Noodle News. But its correspondents ranged the world for courageous, rock-solid reporting. Today, smeared with corporate sleaze, it is chicken something-else.

As I was finishing this report, a news flash forced a redo: David Zaslav, the “content” mogul who swallowed CNN a year ago, fired Chris Licht, the new CEO he had tasked with reshaping it. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Mine is that it will be ugly.

CNN still provides some compelling coverage. But any news organization’s authority depends on credibility and day-to-day standards. Its worst blunts its best. Even at Fox “News,” a travesty to truth, a few good reporters play piano in a whorehouse.

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PARIS — This one is personal. After posting a shorter version on Facebook, I emailed a copy to a Zuckerberg-averse friend, now 87, a New Yorker who retired to the Carolinas after publishing some great books — and also one of mine. He suggested I make it a Mort Report.

In the photo, my ambience-director wife, Jeannette Hermann (on the left), is with Jillie Faraday, a multi-talented grande dame and for decades our neighbor afloat on the Seine. They’re advancing a family bash next month near Amalfi. I’ll be 80, inshallah. Hence, this piece.

Being a zealot about firsthand reporting, I’m bemused when people in their 20s, or 60s, describe authoritatively what it’s like to be in the octogenarian zone. Mostly malarky.

We all have a sell-by date, but we’re all different. Physical aspects are secondary. As with cars, parts can be swapped out. FDR did admirably in a wheel chair to end the Great Depression and (eventually) take the lead to beat back Hitler and Hirohito. It's those little gray cells that matter.