Acquiring Solutions Granted, Inc. expands SonicWall’s cybersecurity solutions creating a cost-effective, flexible, and technology-driven managed security offering

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 17 November 2023 – SonicWall, a global cybersecurity leader, today announced the acquisition of Solutions Granted, Inc. (SGI), a top Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), delivering world-class cybersecurity solutions to hundreds of Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The acquisition reinforces SonicWall’s commitment to its valued partners and extends its portfolio to include U.S.-based Security Operations Center services (SOCaaS), Managed Detection and Response (MDR), and other managed services that are tailor-made for MSPs and MSSPs.

“IT teams have turned to MDR and other managed services to identify and triage digital threats – it’s a critical need we are now excited to offer,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bob VanKirk. “Together, SonicWall and Solutions Granted will empower cybersecurity and technology service providers with economical threat defense solutions and extend a world-class, comprehensive portfolio that streamlines managing security across customer environments with automated threat detection and response services.”

The acquisition aligns with SonicWall’s outside-in approach, providing partners with a best-of-suite, comprehensive and flexible portfolio that accelerates their growth.

“Solutions Granted’s understanding of the critical nature of MSPs/MSSPs operations has helped us create an integrated approach for end-to-end managed threat protection that enables customers to navigate the turbulent cybersecurity landscape with confidence and resilience,” said CEO of Solutions Granted Michael Crean. “Today’s MSPs and MSSPs increasingly need a platform of managed security solutions rather than point solutions. The combination of SonicWall and Solutions Granted delivers services specifically designed for today’s partners – giving them a distinct competitive edge.”

Today’s cybersecurity partners need highly automated solutions to quickly identify and respond to new threats across the entire customer environment – including network, endpoints, servers, and cloud. This combined offering will also leverage the latest in AI to provide a differentiated, effective, and highly proficient service.

“Having been a SonicWall partner for over 20 years and also having experience with Solutions Granted’s MDR and other managed services, this is a win for SonicWall’s portfolio,” said Dan Browne, President of DTM Consulting, an MSP and longtime SonicWall and SGI partner. “In this economic climate, vendors need to be as flexible as ever to help us provide solutions to combat this ever-escalating threat landscape faced by managed service providers. The combination of SonicWall and Solution Granted will help partners address the demands of providing cybersecurity solutions to clients around the world.”

For more information about SonicWall and its newest acquisition please attend: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/5052/600250.

Hashtag: #SonicWall

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About SonicWall

SonicWall is a cybersecurity forerunner with more than 30 years of expertise and is recognized as the leading partner-first company. With the ability to build, scale and manage security across the cloud, hybrid and traditional environments in real-time, SonicWall provides seamless protection against the most evasive cyberattacks across endless exposure points for increasingly remote, mobile and cloud-enabled users. With its own threat research center, SonicWall can quickly and economically provide purpose-built security solutions to enable any organization—enterprise, government agencies and SMBs—around the world. For more information, visit www.sonicwall.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

By Tony Pecinovsky

This has been a tumultuous year. Millions marched in the streets against police brutality and violence after the killing of George Floyd. They were tear-gassed, shot with rubber bullets and percussion grenades, and run over, among any number of other civil liberties abuses. Their demand was “Black Lives Matter!”

Their persistence has scored some gains. Not only have racist statues been torn down, not only did Mississippi vote to remove the Confederate symbol from its flag, not only are AFL-CIO central labor councils discussing the expulsion of racist police associations, in addition to all of this—and so much more—the first Black Lives Matter activist, Cori Bush, is now serving in Congress (Democrat-1st District) in St. Louis, just a stone’s throw from where Michael Brown was killed by police in 2014. Even with all these wins, a lot more remains to be done of course.

But with all of this in mind, it’s appropriate that a new biography of Paul Robeson—one of the most dynamic, well-known, and loved civil rights leaders of the 20th century—should come to press.

A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson: Ballad of an American by Sharon Rudahl, Paul Buhle, and Lawrence Ware is a unique mix of art, history, and radical narrative. It is a welcome introduction to Robeson’s unsurpassed contributions to the struggles for workers’ rights, African American equality, peace, and—yes—socialism.

Robeson, like many African Americans of his generation, was born of former slaves. His father, who escaped through the Underground Railroad and later became a minister, instilled in young Paul a sense of duty to his people and his class.

Robeson as a young boy experienced racism in academics, sports, and music—all things he excelled at. Despite being a top student, Paul’s racist principal did not let him know about a special Rutgers University entrance exam awarding a full scholarship to the winner. In spite of this, Robeson “was the top scoring candidate in New Jersey.” So began his academic career at Rutgers, where he soon immersed himself as an athlete, singer, and academic.

Rudahl, Buhle, and Ware do a wonderful job of condensing Robeson’s early years. The graphic art and narration, coupled with the biographical information, are an easy read—just like a comic book. This makes Ballad of an American a useful text not only for older readers, but for younger students as well. It could easily be incorporated as part of a junior high African-American history curriculum.

Of most interest to this reviewer is Robeson’s activist-political career, and I’m happy to say that Rudahl, Buhle, and Ware do a wonderful job of capturing—as much as a short, graphic biography can capture—the complexities of global political commitments within the context of the Great Depression, World War II, and Cold War.

By the 1930s, Robeson was already world-renowned and quite wealthy, though he never forgot where he came from—his people, nor his class. Success did not temper his politics.

It was during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1934 that Robeson began to articulate an affinity for Soviet socialism and its contributions to the struggle for African-American equality and Black liberation globally. He said, “Here I am not a Negro, but a human being…I walk in full human dignity.”

It was Robeson’s affinity for Soviet socialism and his friendships with prominent Black Communists such as Benjamin Davis, Jr., William L. Patterson, AlphaeusHunton, and Ferdinand Smith—as well as with the Communist Party USA as an organization—that eventually lead to his blacklisting in the United States, his passport being revoked, and his near isolation later in life.

It is on the tricky question of Robeson’s relationship to the CPUSA that I have one minor quip with Rudahl, Buhle, and Ware’s otherwise wonderful contribution.

Perhaps, as a by-product of Rutgers University attempting to whitewash or sanitize Robeson’s Communist affiliations, Rudahl, Buhle, and Ware chose to minimize this aspect of Robeson’s life?  Perhaps there just wasn’t enough space in a compact book to go into the amount of detail this reviewer believes is warranted?

That Robeson’s relationship to the CPUSA is only mentioned in passing or in relation to House Un-American Activities Committee hearings is problematic, especially as Soviet socialism and the CPUSA so clearly played profound parts in his political life.

With that in mind, I’ll end my review with a quote from Robeson. In 1956, as he was being questioned by HUAC political inquisitors, Robeson was asked why he didn’t just “stay in Russia?” His reply is just as relevant today as President Trump, Republicans and Democrats, and various organizations—like the so-called Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation—work to initiate another Red Scare.

Robeson replied: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part in it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

Aside from the minor quip mentioned above, A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson: Ballad of an American is highly recommended and would make a great stocking-stuffer this holiday season. (IPA Service)

President Trump asked former FBI Director Jim Comey to lock up journalists for publishing classified information during a February Oval Office meeting, according to a memo written by Comey shortly after the meeting summarized Tuesday by The New York Times.

Trump urged Comey to imprison journalists at the beginning of an exchange during which he also asked the former FBI chief to back off an investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, according to the story:

Mr. Comey had been in the Oval Office that day with other senior national security officials for a terrorism threat briefing. When the meeting ended, Mr. Trump told those present — including Mr. Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — to leave the room except for Mr. Comey.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

This isn’t the first time President Trump has threatened to curtail press access or punish leakers. On March 20, he tweeted, “must find leaker now!” in response to successive stories about the ongoing FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s associates and Russian officials.

This latest revelation is “a disturbing yet unsurprising culmination of Trump’s war on the press,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in an email.

“Reporting on classified information is a bedrock right of journalists, and so I guess it’s only natural, given his past statements, that Trump wants to take that away,” he said. “Any prosecution of reporters for publishing true information about our government would strike at the very heart of press freedom.”

The comments by President Trump “cross a dangerous line,” Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said in a statement.

“But no president gets to jail journalists,” he continued. “Reporters are protected by judges and juries, by a congress that relies on them to stay informed, and by a Justice Department that for decades has honored the role of a free press by spurning prosecutions of journalists for publishing leaks of classified information.”

“Comments such as these, emerging in the way they did, only remind us that every day public servants are reaching out to reporters to ensure the public is aware of the risks today to rule of law in this country,” he said. “The president’s remarks should not intimidate the press but inspire it.”

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the exchange is that it represents an “unprecedented” departure from the practices of previous presidential administrations with regard to leak investigations, said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the Obama administration, reporters were ensnared and subpoenaed in investigations that targeted leakers, not journalists. This is more direct, Simon said.

And it’s in line with an analysis conducted by CPJ that found prosecution of journalists in leak investigations is the No. 1 threat to press freedom posed by the Trump administration, Simon said.

“We did our own internal analysis of what we perceived as the greatest potential threats of the Trump administration,” he said. “This was at the top.”

In partnership with TechCrunch, The Europas Conference & Awards, is a different kind of tech event which features main-stage speakers and panels as well as smaller breakout sessions on key subjects for startups. The Europas conference is followed by a glittering awards based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself.

Voting is now live, so please go and vote!

The awards are editorially led, with many nominated and others suggested by judges. There is no charge to enter or to be selected or to win. Meanwhile, you can grab tickets here.

The awards are supported by TechCrunch, the official and exclusive media partner. Attendees, nominees and winners will get deep discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year.

Held annually, The Europas are the awards for technology startups in Europe. The whole thing comes together on a special awards night in London, on June 13, which is preceded by a smaller scale, but intimate, conference where VIPs mix freely with attendees.

There is also a VIP event on June 12, PathFounders, specifically geared to fund-raising startups and investors.

As well as main stage speakers and panels, the ‘special sauce’ of The Europas is the small, intimate breakout sessions where delegates can deep-dive into vertical topics with expert speakers. Plus the more fun stuff in the programme, like the music and cultural side events.

Speakers will include:

BARBARA BELVISI, Hardware Club
EILEEN BURBIDGE, Passion Capital
SHERRY COUTU, Founders4Schools
FRED DESTIN, Accel
TRACY DORÉE, Kindred
SAUL KLEIN, Localglobe
AZEEM AZHAR, Exponential View
ALICIA NAVARRO, Skimlinks
RESHMA SOHONI, Seedcamp
SARAH WOOD, Unruly
SITAR TELI, Connect Ventures
DAVID BENIGSON, Signal
TUGCE ERGUL, Angel Labs
VISHAL GULATI, Draper Esprit
VOLKER HIRSCH, Emerge Education
MARK LITTLE, Journalist
BROCK PIERCE, Blockchain Capital
CRYSTAL ROSE, Sensay
MANDEEP SINGH, Trouva
GABRIELLE APLIN, Singer Songwriter
ANNA BOFETTA, Balderton Capital
ALI PARSA, babylon
HAMISH GRIERSON, Thriva
AVI KASZTAN, Sixgill
RICHARD BROWNING, Gravity.co
JAMES CHAPPELL, Digital Shadows
BESS MAYHEW, More United
VINCE WALSH, UCL
ALEX DEPLEDGE, BuildPath
KENNY EWAN, WeFarm
RAPH CROUAN, Startupbootcamp IoT
HARRY STEBBINGS, The 20 Minute VC
ELLA GOLDNER, Zinc.vc
ERIK HARRELL, Kahoot!
ROMILLY DENNYS, Coadec
DOUG WINTER, Isotoma
SOFIA FENICHELL, Mrs. Wordsmith
RAJESH AGRAWAL, Deputy Mayor of London for Business
PETER CAHILL, Voysis
DANIEL KORSKI, Public
JANE MARTINSON, The Guardian
GABBI CAHANE, Multiple
JEFF LYNN, Seedrs
TINA BAKER, JAG Shaw Baker
DENZYL FEIGELSON, Platoon
SEBASTIAN PECK, InMotion, Jaguar Land Rover
LAURE CLAIRE REILLIER, Launchworks
BENOIT REILLIER, Launchworks
PEER HEINLEIN, Mailbox.org
STEPHANIE ALYS, MysteryVibe

In addition, featured attendees include:

Ben Tompkins, Eden Ventures
Chrys Chrysanthou, Notion Capital
Janne Kyttanen, WTF VC
Karen McCormick, Beringea
Sandy Mckinnon, Pentech Ventures
Jeff Lynn, Seedrs
Jon Bradford, Dubai Future Accelerators
Simon Murdoch, Episode1 Partners
Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital

Instead of thousands of people, think of a great summer event with just 2,000 of the most interesting and useful people you could hope to meet.

• No secret VIP rooms, which means you get to interact with the Speakers

• Key Founders and investors speaking; featured attendees invited to just network

• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A directly from the main stage

• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics

• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking

• Journalists from major tech titles, newspapers and business broadcasters

• A parallel Founders-only track (PathFounders) geared towards fund-raising and hyper-networking

• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene

• All on one day to maximise your time in London

That’s what The Europas aims to achieve. A great group of people from all over Europe, with key investors, founders and ecosystem players.

And what better way to do that in the summer sun, in London’s coolest part of town, with a drink in your hand, the prospect of some great conversations, and a fantastic party and celebration of the European startup scene in the evening.

This year the event is also moving East, to the amazing new ‘Hear East’ location, a locus for startups, and right by the incredible cultural quarter of Hackney Wick. And don’t worry, there will be super-cool hotels for people to hang out together in.

That’s just the beginning. There’s more to come…

There are three types of tickets available

• Daytime conference and evening awards tickets (valid all day, June 13th) – this ticket includes the daytime conference and the awards dinner with ceremony and after party. It includes refreshments and lunch during the conference, and the awards drinks reception and dinner. Get your ticket here.

• Evening Awards-only tickets (valid from 18.00 until midnight, June 13th) – this ticket is for the awards dinner with ceremony and after party. It includes the awards drinks reception and dinner. Individual tickets are on sale here.

If you wish to purchase a table for 10 or 12 guest or a half table for 5 guests, please contact petra@twistedtree.co.uk.

• PathFounders (valid 12-14 June including The Europas conference and awards: this ticket is for start-up Founders only (and invite-only early stage investors) and includes the PathFounders programme. PathFounders commences early afternoon on 12 June and ends early afternoon on 14 June. You can apply for a Pathfounders ticket here.

PathFounders is the exclusive event for startup Founders, in particular those at an early stage and/or fund-raising. On the day before the Europas on 12 June, by invitation-only, PathFounders will bring together Founders and Investors in a series of exclusive networking experiences in London. This will bring 150 of Europe’s hottest early-stage Founders together with Europe’s best VCs and Angel Investors in a relaxed environment with amazing hospitality.

The Europas Awards 2017 are held in association with London Tech Week and sponsors include HereEast, Highland Europe, ihorizon, JAG Shaw Baker, Orrick, and Fieldhouse Associates.

Interested in sponsoring the Europas or hosting a table at the awards? Get in touch with:
Petra Johansson // petra@theeuropas.com

Questions on speaking? Contact Dianne See Morrison // Dianne@theeuropas.com

by: Mark Robinson and Emma Powell, Investors Chronicle

Shares in Anglo American have risen 84 per cent base-to-apex within the past 12 months, a reflection of improved commodity pricing combined with cumulative rationalisation measures.

Earlier this year, it was announced that the miner’s chairman, Sir John Parker, had decided to call it a day after an eight-year tenure in which he oversaw the sale of numerous assets deemed surplus to requirements, the latest of which — an 88.2 per cent interest in the Drayton thermal coal mine in New South Wales — was announced this month.

Not all of the sales met with universal shareholder approval, but no one pretends that it has been plain sailing for Sir John since he came on board, particularly given the weakness in underlying markets through 2014-16.

But prices for speciality metals and bulks, most notably iron ore, strengthened considerably through last year. The consequent rise in cash flows, along with the asset sales, enabled the embattled commodities giant to reduce net debt as a proportion of shareholder funds by around two-fifths since the end of 2015. So he leaves the group, if not in rude health, then certainly in better trim than he probably might have thought possible 18 months ago.

Shares in London Stock Exchange rocketed following the announcement of its proposed merger with Deutsche Börse in February last year. Despite the deal finally falling through this April on competition grounds, very little of these gains have fallen out of the share price. Now chief executive Xavier Rolet has sold shares in the group worth £1.8m.

Even without completing the deal, London Stock Exchange looks in pretty good shape. Income from continuing operations was up almost a fifth during the first four months of the year at £459m; information and post-trade services have led the way in terms of revenue growth.

Global clearing business LCH increased revenue by almost a third during this period, thanks to growth in over-the-counter clearing of derivatives contracts through its SwapClear platform. Meanwhile, demand has remained high for information services, with sales up 9 per cent on a like-for-like basis during the first four months of the year. This is largely due to the popularity of FTSE Russell indices.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Should we make homelessness against the law and simply throw all homeless people into prison so that we don’t have to deal with them?  Incredibly, this is actually starting to happen in dozens of major cities all across the United States.  It may be difficult to believe, but in many large urban areas today, if you are found guilty of “public camping” you can be taken directly to jail.  In some cities, activities such as “blocking a walkway” or creating any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation” are also considered to be serious crimes.  And there are some communities that have even made it illegal to feed the homeless without an official permit.  Unfortunately, as the U.S. economy continues to slow down the number of homeless people will continue to grow, and so this is a crisis that is only going to grow in size and scope.

Of course the goal of many of these laws is to get the homeless to go somewhere else.  But as these laws start to multiply all across the nation, pretty soon there won’t be too many places left where it is actually legal to be homeless.

One city that is being highly criticized for passing extremely draconian laws is Houston.  In that city it is actually illegal for the homeless to use any sort of material to shield themselves from the wind, the rain and the cold…

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner is taking a similar approach—his anti-encampment ordinance makes it illegal to use “fabric, metal, cardboard, or other materials as a tent or temporary structure for human habitation.” This ensures that the Houstonian homeless are vulnerable not just to the elements, but also to the constant threat of the police. Officials cite one of the most common justifications for crackdowns on the homeless: neighborhood safety (a more socially acceptable way of talking about the not-in-my-backyard mentality).

With all of the other problems that we are facing as a nation, it stuns me that there are politicians that would spend their time dreaming up such sick and twisted laws.

According to one news report, the homeless in Houston are now officially banned from doing all of the following things…

1. They can’t block a sidewalk, stand in a roadway median or block a building doorway. (AKA they can’t panhandle).

2. They also can’t do any of these things — blocking walkways — under state law that already existed.

3. They can’t sleep in tents, boxes or any other makeshift shelter on public property.

4. They also can’t have heating devices.

5. They can’t carry around belongings that take up space more than three feet long, three feet wide, three feet tall.

6. People can’t spontaneously feed more than five homeless people without a permit.

If I was a homeless person in Houston, I would definitely be looking to get out of there.

But where are they going to go?

Things are almost as bad in Dallas.  In fact, it is being reported that the police in Dallas “issued over 11,000 citations for sleeping in public from January 2012 to November 2015.”

When you break that number down, it comes to 323 citations per month.

Of course some people have tried to challenge these types of laws in court, but most of the challenges have been unsuccessful.  For example, just check out what recently happened in Denver…

Three people who were contesting Denver’s urban-camping ban were found guilty on Wednesday, April 5, at the Lindsey-Flanigan courthouse. The defendants — Jerry Burton, Randy Russell and Terese Howard — were determined to have unlawfully camped on November 28, 2016, and to have interfered with police operations at one location. All three were sentenced with court-ordered probation for one year and between twenty and forty hours of community service.

The case challenged Denver’s unauthorized-camping ordinance, which has been divisive ever since Denver City Council approved it in 2012.

Since the courts are generally upholding these laws, this has just emboldened more communities to adopt anti-homelessness ordinances.  According to one report, dozens of major cities have now passed such laws…

City-wide bans on public camping (PDF) have increased by 69 percent throughout the United States. What used to be seen as an annoyance is now prohibited, forcing fines or jail time on those who certainly can’t afford it. The only nationwide nonprofit devoted to studying this, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, has been tracking these changes since 2006. Their findings? There are a scary number of laws passed that ironically make it costly to be homeless.

For example, in 33 of the 100 U.S. cities they studied, it’s illegal to publicly camp. In 18, it’s illegal to sleep in public. Panhandling is illegal in 27 cities.

In 39 cities, it’s illegal to live in vehicles.

As I have warned repeatedly, we are seeing hearts grow cold all around us.  Instead of doing everything that they can to try to help those in need, communities are trying to make them go some place else, and those that try to feed and help the homeless are being harshly penalized.

Sadly, all of this comes at a time when homelessness is on the rise all over America.  In a previous article I pointed out that in New York City the number of homeless people recently hit a brand new all-time high, and things have gotten so bad in Los Angeles that the L.A. City Council has formally requested that Governor Jerry Brown declare a state of emergency.

We tend to think of the homeless as bearded old men with drinking problems, but the truth is that many of the homeless are children.

In fact, the number of homeless children in the United States has risen by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.

If this is how we are going to treat some of the most vulnerable members of our society while things are still relatively stable, how are we going to be treating one another when the economy completely collapses?

Hanging over discussion of Federal Reserve tightening has been a potentially market-shaking question: how to safely unwind the crisis-era asset purchases that bloated the central bank’s balance sheet.

Policymakers led by Janet Yellen, the Fed chair, have approached the topic gingerly, acutely aware of the potential to repeat the so-called taper tantrum of 2013, where ill-timed talk of slowing bond purchases roiled global markets.

Yet for all the nerves, the coming shake-up in the Fed’s balance sheet may end up being far less radical than some investors have believed.

The Fed will need to operate with a much larger balance sheet than before the crisis — at least three times as big, say some investors — in part because of regulatory and other changes governing financial institutions’ appetite for safe assets, as well as a major overhaul of the Fed’s rate-setting framework.

“Investors believe that the Fed is going to be very careful about balance sheet reduction, but many don’t realise that the Fed doesn’t have to do that much to get the balance sheet down to the right size,” says Ajay Rajadhyaksha, head of macro research at Barclays.

The fight against financial and economic implosion during the crisis prompted the Fed not only to cut rates to near zero, but also to swell its balance sheet by $3.5tn during quantitative easing. Its holdings now stand at an unprecedented $4.5tn, including $2.5tn of Treasuries and $1.8tn of mortgage-backed securities.

With the Fed’s rate-raising campaign now gathering steam, the Federal Open Market Committee has stepped up its discussion of ways of paring back the size of its balance sheet.

The topic is likely to feature in discussions ahead of this week’s rate-setting meeting, at which the Fed is set to peg rates at their current target range of 0.75 per cent to 1 per cent. Ms Yellen appears ready to set the parameters of the balance-sheet shrinking process before she potentially leaves office in January of next year. That means her successor — if she is not reappointed — will inherit a clear plan rather than a monetary hot potato.

It has the potential to be disastrous if they’re not very very careful

Paring back its balance sheet is a way of further taking the foot off the monetary accelerator. It will help alleviate political pressure from the right over the Fed’s interventions in the economy. Its holdings of mortgage-backed securities are seen as particularly unwelcome, given they have made the Fed the dominant player in that notionally private market.

To date the markets have appeared unperturbed by the crescendo of Fed talk over balance sheet shrinkage. This is in part because of growing signs that the reduction may be modest. A number of economists expect the balance sheet to settle at 3tn or bigger once a very gradual process of shrinkage has taken place.

There are several reasons for this. The flipside of the assets on the Fed’s balance sheet are liabilities. These include currency in circulation, the Fed’s reverse repurchase agreements, the US Treasury’s Fed bank account, and commercial banks’ excess reserves — the latter having swelled when the Fed was hoovering up stockpiles of Treasuries and MBS during the crisis.

New regulations requiring banks to maintain ample liquidity mean their appetite for central bank reserves and other ultra-safe assets has grown dramatically since before the crisis. What is more, the Fed appears to be deciding against shifting back to its old system of setting rates by varying a scarce supply of reserves. Instead, under its so-called floor system it pays interest at an administered rate on banks’ excess reserves, as well as setting the rate on a reverse repurchase programme with non-bank players such as money market funds.

Ben Bernanke, the Fed’s former chairman, has said that the critical level of reserves needed for the Fed to transmit its monetary policy through the floor system involving excess reserves is well over $1tn. A recent annual report from the New York Fed’s markets desk sketches out scenarios of reserves being anywhere between $100bn to $1tn in the longer term.

Roberto Perli, an economist at Cornerstone Macro, says reserves seem likely to stay at $500bn at least. With currency in circulation continuing to grow steadily with the economy in the coming years, he expects the Fed to shrink its balance sheet at a relatively leisurely pace of $300bn a year over half a decade, taking reserves to just under $3tn. Other analysts see the balance sheet ending up even larger.

The annual tightening entailed in that sort of balance sheet shrinkage is just 16 basis points a year — equivalent to less than a rate rise every year, Mr Perli estimates. “Unless the regulatory environment changes it would be hard for the Fed to go back to the old system of reserve scarcity even if they wanted to,” he said.

How will the Fed’s asset holdings evolve given this outlook? Assuming that the Fed wants to get rid of all its $1.8tn of mortgage bonds as it gingerly retreats from the home loan market, the central bank may have to start buying Treasuries again at the tail-end of the process, Mr Rajadhyaksha predicts.

The Fed is “not going to move aggressively”, says Erin Browne, head of macro investing at UBS O’Connor, a hedge fund. The central bank currently ploughs coupons and repayments back into the market, and she expects it to only start reducing its reinvestment by $10bn a month — split equally between Treasuries and mortgage-backed bonds — from January. That will continue until the balance sheet is roughly at $3.5tn, Ms Browne predicts.

Not all market players are sanguine that the process will unfold smoothly. “They’re hiking rates even as they’re shrinking the balance sheet,” says Michael Mullaney, an analyst at Boston Partners. “It has the potential to be disastrous if they’re not very very careful.”

The public should be able to freely access the names of the people behind the ownership of assets and bank accounts in order to boost transparency and stop secret shell companies being used for criminal activity.

This is the key contention of a host of submissions to Treasury as part of the federal government’s plans to increase transparency of the beneficial ownership of companies following the Panama Papers revelations.

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Michael Pascoe: Building the future

Michael Pascoe: Building the future

Australia’s spending on road and rail is picking up the slack from housing construction. Michael Pascoe comments.

Panama papers: crime gangs, not just tax dodgers

Bikie gangs and organised crime gangs are among the 800 Australian entities revealed in the Panama papers, according to evidence by the Australian Tax Office.

“The Panama Papers and other similar leaks provide a wealth of information on how legal entities created in tax havens are used to commit crimes and launder the proceeds,” said Transparency International Australia (TIA).

TIA supports the creation of a central register to record beneficial ownership information. It said ​a central register could be maintained by either AUSTRAC or the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

“The only thing that is likely to stop or curtail the misuse of shell companies and other legal structures for criminal activity is the ability for law enforcement, journalists, financial institutions and interested members of the general public to cheaply, or freely, access the names of the people behind the ownership of assets and bank accounts.”

TIA said phoenix companies being incorporated off the back of their failed predecessors could also be tackled.

“There is the need to ensure that illegal phoenix activity is stamped out and a key method of achieving better detection of phoenix activities would be by reliably gathering and sharing information,” the submission said.

TIA has also suggested greater protection and financial rewards for whistleblowers.

Don’t exclude trusts

The Treasury Consultation Paper does not apply to trusts, which are often used for tax avoidance or criminal purposes.

Chartered Accountants’ submission said “an informed discussion about the beneficial ownership of companies cannot occur without some consideration of trusts and other types of legal entities which can appear in a company’s ownership structure”.

“Failure to address this issue in the design … means that the policy intent could be easily frustrated by inserting a trust or other type of opaque entity in the ownership chain.”

The Law Society of NSW also wants the register of beneficial owners to be public. It said transparency was crucial as global finance and power became more concentrated.

The Panama Papers and other similar leaks provide a wealth of information on how legal entities created in tax havens are used to commit crimes and launder the proceeds

Transparency International Australia

The Australian Shareholders Association also supports a beneficial ownership register to “help create a global financial system that is transparent and accountable”. It said ASIC should operate the register and be given sufficient funding and resources to carry out this additional responsibility.

Tyro Payments also proposes a central register be part of ASIC’s existing companies public register. It could include detail on each individual shareholder on the company’s register, including name, date of birth, place of birth and residential address, and whether shares are being held on behalf of another entity such as a trust, company or partnership.

“This would merely be adding an extension to the current register and such changes to incorporate the new information would not be onerous to implement,” Tyro’s submission said.

The Australian Institute of Company Directors said Australia’s more than 2.4 million companies already grapple with compliance costs and suggested the government provide an exemption for listed entities from any new beneficial ownership disclosure requirements.

The onus, it said, should instead be placed on “the natural persons holding a relevant interest in a company’s shares, rather than the company being obliged to ascertain or verify this information”.

G20 push for transparency

The federal government’s consultation process follows a global push for greater transparency, with the G20 committed to implementing rules requiring the disclosure of beneficial ownership of legal entities.

The push came after more than 11.5 million documents from a Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, were leaked and later published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, prompting a global hunt for criminals.

The papers, dating back to 1977, hold information on about 214,000 offshore entities including connections to Australian taxpayers  being investigated by the Australian Taxation Office.

The Panama leaks allege that, apart from outright tax avoidance, some of the companies domiciled in tax havens were also being used for money laundering, financing of terrorism, and arms and drug deals.

World leaders including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Russian President Vladimir Putin were named in the papers, although no criminal activity was linked to them. Iceland’s former prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson was forced to stand down after his wife was named in the papers.

For business people, AI presents a variety of challenges. On a technology level, artificial intelligence and machine learning is complicated to develop and demands rich data sets to produce meaningful results. From a business perspective, many business leaders have difficulty figuring out where to apply AI and even how to start the machine intelligence journey.

Making matters worse, the constant drumbeat of AI hype from every technology vendor has created a continual barrage of noise confuses the market about the real possibilities of AI.

To cut through this noise, I have invited many world-leading practitioners to share their expertise as part of the CXOTALK series of conversations with innovators.

For episode 219 of CXOTALK, I spoke with Michael Chui, a Principal at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), and David Bray, an Eisenhower Fellow who is also CIO at the Federal Communications Commission.

The McKinsey Global Institute has released a variety of research reports on topics related to Ai, automation, and jobs. For example, see this article on the fundamentals of workplace automation.

As you can see in the graphic below, Chui and his team examined a variety of industries looking at the impact of automation, including AI, on the workforce.

Another fascinating graphic showing automation potential and wages for US jobs:

The conversation between Michael Chui and David Bray covered key points about the relationship of business and the workforce to automation and AI – including investment, planning, and even ethical considerations.

You can watch our entire conversation in the video embedded above. An edited partial transcript is available below and you can read the complete transcript at the CXOTALK site.

How should organizations think about investing in AI?

Michael Chiu: More organizations have started to understand the potential of data analytics. Executives are starting to understand that data and analytics are either becoming a basis of competition or a basis for offering the services and products that your customers, citizens, and stakeholders need.

While there are often real technology challenges, we often find the real barrier is the people stuff. How do you get from an interesting experiment to business-relevant insight? We could increase the conversion rate by X percentage if we used this next product to buy an algorithm and this data; we could reduce the maintenance costs, or increase the uptime of this whole good. We could, in fact, bring more people into this public service because we can find them better.

Getting from that insight to capture value at scale is where organizations are either stuck or falling. How do you bag that interesting insight, that thing that you capture, whether in it’s in the form of a machine learning algorithm, or other types of analytics, into the practices and processes of an organization, so it changes the way things operate at scale? To use a military metaphor: How do you steer that aircraft carrier? It’s as true for freight ships as it is for military ships. They are hard things to turn.

It’s the organizational challenge of understanding the mindsets, having the right talent in place, and then changing the practices at scale. That’s where we see a big difference between organizations who have just reached awareness and maybe done something interesting and ones who have radically changed their performance in a positive way through data, analytics, and AI.

What are the adoption problems around AI and machine learning?

David Bray: The real secret to success is changing what people do in an organization, that you can’t just roll out technology and say, “We’ve gone digital, but we didn’t change any of our business processes,” and expect to have any great outcomes. I have seen experiments that are isolated from the rest of public service; and they say, “Well look, we’re doing these experiments over here!” but they’re never translating to changing how you do the business of public service at scale.

Doing that requires not just technology, but understanding the narrative of how the current processes work, why they’re being done that way in an organization, and then what is the to-be state, and how are you going to be that leader that shepherds the change from the as-is to the to-be state? For public service, we probably lack conversations right now about how to deliver results differently and dramatically better to the public.

Artificial intelligence, in some respects, is just a continuation of predictive analytics, a continuation of big data, it is nothing new because technology always changes the art of the possible; this is just a new art of the possible.

I do think there’s an interesting thing in which it could offer a reflection of our biases through artificial intelligence. If we’re not careful, we’ll roll out artificial intelligence, populating it with data from humans, [and] we know humans have biases, and we’ll find out that the artificial intelligence itself, the machine learning itself, is biased. I think that’s a little bit more unique than just a predictive analytics bias or big data.

Which business areas most suited to AI?

Michael Chiu: When we surveyed about 600 different industry experts, every single one of those problems we identified, at least one expert suggested it was one of the top three problems that machine learning could help improve. And so, what that says is potential is just absolutely huge. There’s almost no problem where AI and machine learning potentially couldn’t change and improve performance.

A few things that come to mind: One is a lot of the most interesting and recent research has been in this field called “deep learning,” and that’s particularly suited for certain types of problems with pattern recognition, often images, etc. And so those problems that are like image recognition, pattern recognition, etc. are some of those that are quite amenable and interesting.

So again, regarding very specific types of problems, predictive maintenance is huge. The ability to keep something from breaking; rather than waiting until it breaks and then fixing it, the ability to predict when something’s going to break. Not only because it reduces the cost. More important, is the thing doesn’t go down. If you bring down a part of an assembly line, you bring down the entire factory or often the entire line.

To a certain extent, that is an example of pattern matching. Sensors are the signals that reflect that something’s going to break, informing you to do predictive maintenance. We find that across a huge number of specific industries that have these capital assets, whether it’s a generator, a building, an HDC system, or a vehicle, where if you’re able to predict ahead of time before something’s going to break, you should conduct some maintenance. That is one of the areas in which machine learning can be quite powerful.

Health care is another case of predictive maintenance but on the human capital asset. Then you can start to think, “Well gosh! I have the internet of things.” I have sensors on a patient’s body. Can I tell before they’re going to have a cardiac incident? Can I tell before someone’s going to have a diabetic incident? That they should take some actions which could be less expensive, and less invasive, than having it turn into an emergent case where they must go through a very expensive, painful, and urgent care type of situation?

Again, can you use machine learning make predictions? Those are some of the problems things that can potentially be solved better by using AI and machine learning.

David Bray: There are opportunities for artificial intelligence and machine learning to help the public. I think a lot is going to happen first in cities.

We’ve heard about smart cities. You can easily see better preventive maintenance on roads or power generation and then monitoring to avoid brownouts. I think the real practical, initial, early adoption of AI and machine learning is going to happen first at the city level. Then we’ve got to figure out how to best use it at the federal level.

CXOTALK brings together the most innovative leaders in the world for in-depth conversations about leadership and innovation. See the complete list of episodes.

Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here.

Donald Trump is temporary ratings gold, which is either evidence of renewed civic engagement or merely the decline of Western civilization.

Variety reports that Fox News “finished far and above its competition in the ratings for the first quarter of 2017, with the network putting up the highest-rated quarter ever in cable news history in the total day viewership measure, according to Nielsen data released Tuesday.”

Cable ratings still pale in comparison to the big broadcast networks. And their historical fragmentation persist, spasms of industry propaganda aside. But the sales departments at Fox, MSNBC and CNN have some reason to cheer. Fox averages 1.72 million total day viewers, with CNN next at 826,000 and MSNBC third at 781,000, with the latter sharply growing viewership of late.

Trump’s divisiveness is exactly what the networks are benefiting from.

Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist who studied media consumption patterns while previously at the University of Chicago, says, “One thought is that none of this seems very consistent with the idea that people no longer pay attention to mainstream media.”

It would be interesting, he says, to see if Republicans and Democrats have become any more dispersed among the three networks. When he and colleague Jesse Shapiro (now at Brown University) assessed the state of play for a 2011 academic article, they found the Fox News’ audience at 54 percent conservatives, 13 percent liberal and 33 percent moderate. Their full data is right here.

Matthew Baum, a public policy expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School and analyst of the nexus of mass media and politics, demurred when I suggested that one lump together CNN and MSNBC and perhaps conclude that there’s a roughly 50-50 liberal-conservative split in the cable audience.

“I would just add that in most respects CNN has situated itself as the centrist network, and so I think it would not be at all fair to describe the cable universe as more or less ideologically balanced in terms of audience. It’s not.”

“That said, I think CNN in general, and Jake Tapper in particular, has been fairly critical of Trump’s behavior in office, though less consistently so than MSNBC. So if you want to divide the cable world into camps of shilling for Trump vs. skeptical of Trump, then I suppose your comparison makes somewhat more sense.”

“While MSNBC is more or less the mirror opposite of Fox, again, CNN is not, as the network assiduously airs both sides of nearly every argument (unlike the other two).” So, he says, when it comes to the ideologically contours of the ratings, “The Fox/pro-Republican side wins hands down I think.”

Finally, there’s this big picture reminder from Markus Prior, a Princeton University political scientist: The cable news universe has been bigger. And it’s been, on the whole, going down despite overall population growth.

Indeed, the total audience was way higher in the early Obama years, hovering around 4 million. (Pew) But, for now, they, if not Western civilization, should be thankful for Trump.

Says Harvard’s Baum: “Trump is good for business. But slightly more seriously, I would perhaps endorse Andrew Sullivan’s notion that a sign of a democracy in trouble is when people feel the need to pay constant attention to politics, or, alternatively, lose the freedom to ignore politics. Record cable news ratings could thus be interpreted in this light as a troubling sign of a democratic civil society on the ropes.”

Guess who’s not coming to dinner?

Sounds like Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and all their 20-something flunkies in the White House must have the acoustic guitars out and are belting out Pete Seeger’s “Solidarity Forever,” even if none (perhaps beyond self-appointed chief populist Steven Bannon) know of Seeger.

“The White House informed the White House Correspondents’ Association this evening that White House staff will not be attending this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner out of ‘solidarity’ with President Trump, who has previously announced that he would skip the event,” association chief Jeff Mason, a Reuters reporter whose attempts to be solicitous toward the Trump media apparatus have been falling short.

“The WHCA board regrets this decision very much. We have worked hard to build a constructive relationship with the Trump White House and believe strongly that this goal is possible even with the natural tension between the press and administrations that is a hallmark of a healthy republic.”

So if you’re looking for tickets to the dinner, call your chums in D.C. If Trump and White House aides, big and small, ain’t coming, figure that the many administration officials in other departments, some of whom can be a very big “get” for a media outlet, won’t be coming, either.

And, with the Mets in town that weekend against the Nationals, this will not be the hottest ticket around. Plus, come to think of it, there’s the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester, Virginia, and Annapolis Spring Sailboat Show in the Maryland capital.

And, too, there’s author Paul Starobin on “Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860, and the Mania for War” at the Politics and Prose book store.

Culinary journalism at its finest

“The Olive Garden is building its comeback around shrimp scampi” (Bloomberg)

Will the Raiders fans stick around?

There’s no story much bigger in Oakland, California, than the exit of the NFL Raiders to Las Vegas, probably in two, at most three years. And sportswriter Mark Purdy wonders, “Will Bay Area fans keeping showing up in the meantime?”

His candidly ambiguous conclusion: “Your guess is as good as mine. Reactions will probably be all over the map. Nothing this strange has ever happened in American pro sports. But with the Raiders expected to field a playoff-caliber team this fall, it’s hard for me to believe the Coliseum will be very empty.”

“(Owner) Mark Davis said he hopes fans will not take out any anger or emotions on Raider players or coaches, but on ownership. The whole thing may become a sociological experiment about sports consumers and why they attend games. Is their loyalty to a certain team or only to a certain team if it plays in a certain city?” (East Bay Times)

Headline of day

“Trump trades the planet for a few coal jobs in a doomed industry
31 — ‘Trump to future generations: Drop dead’” (The Verge)

News and analysis combo

Reporter Ronn Blitzer wrote the news story for Law Newz, then the separate analysis of sexual assault litigation against the president. The latter opened:

“As I wrote earlier today, President Donald Trump‘s legal team said in a late-night court filing on Monday that they plan to fight the defamation case brought by former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos on the grounds that as President, Trump is immune to such litigation while he’s in office. After reviewing the key points of the arguments on both sides of this issue, it’s highly likely that Trump’s side is right on this one.” (Law Newz)

The death of journalists

Academics Anita Gohdes of the University of Zurich and Sabine Carey of the University of Mannheim scrutinized the more than 1,300 journalist killings between 2002 and 2013 for an academic paper. They note how a great many are killed far from battlefields, often killed in countries less known for repression than we assume, more likely to be done in by state agents than criminal gangs and can represent a harbinger of bad things to come as far as human rights in a nation.

Goddess herself finds notable that the most are killed in what they deem “medium” repressive countries.”It’s not the super repressive ones.” Also, “I think the findings show us just how dangerous it can be to be a journalist — and outside of conflict zones it’s mostly the local members of the press who are targeted, not international ones.”

Joel Simon, who heads the Committee to Protect Journalists, had not seen their paper, though it draws heavily on his group’s data. “I thought it was interesting because it confirmed what I have observed but having the data to back it up is valuable. Based on my experience, killing a journalist is an escalation, whether perpetrated by a state actor or non-state actor.”

Drip, drip, drip

“A year after acquiring the Commercial Appeal and Knoxville News-Sentinel, Gannett made sizable cuts today in both of those newsrooms, in addition to laying off three reporters locally.” (Nashville Scene)

The morning babble

“Morning Joe” was in full Washington status quo defense this morning, heralding the smarts of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell versus the supposed White House troglodytes like Bannon and the days when the likes of Jim Baker and Michael Deaver ambled about the Ronald Reagan White House.

Joe Scarborough even insisted that co-host Mika Brzezinski pipe down (explain that dynamic, please) so he could underscore how astute he was to tell an undisclosed White House source on the first day how dumb it was to tweet photos of the Inauguration Day crowd size. “We are going to kill you,” he claims he told Mr. Unidentified, unless they quickly changed their ways.

Both his crew and CNN’s “New Day” group were very down on White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer but not as down as CNN pundit Errol Louis on Fox’s Bill O’Reilly for those very dumb comments suggesting Rep. Maxine Waters wears a “James Brown wig.”

“Fox & Friends,” which beckoned golfer-entrepreneur Greg Norman to tout Donald Trump as pro-business, made much of Hillary Clinton’s call to “resist, insist, persist, enlist” in San Francisco and called her “the failed candidate.”

However, it didn’t make as much of her black leather outfit as did CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, who found it possibly symbolic of a new combativeness. Hmmm. Imagine if O’Reilly brought that up, too.

The difference between media and tech

Recode’s Kara Swisher does a terrific (and droll) podcast interview with Quincy Smith, a talented banker with tons of experience with big operators in media and tech, including the start of the internet at Netscape. This is one of his many interesting declarations:

“When things get tough in technology, they really laser focus on the product and really don’t buy anything at all. So if you looked at an investment banker’s stock chart of Time Warner or Comcast, you’d see if things are under pressure, they think, ‘What else can we buy to get our fiefdom bigger,’ or, ‘How do we expand things?'”

“Whereas in tech companies, actually that’s the time when they don’t buy things. That’s when they really focus on what is going on with the product. But if they wake up the next morning, you know, and their stock is on a tear, they’re like, ‘Hey, maybe the market is trying to warn us, trying to tell us to do something.'”

“More importantly inside the culture of entrepreneurs, when one zigs the other zags. Inside of a media company, that’s less the case. If (Disney chief) Bob Iger is doing something, it’s more likely that the other moguls will follow suit in terms of what he’s doing rather than have a differing opinion, just because there is too much risk around it.” (Recode)

Facebook goes after Snapchat

“Facebook Inc is giving the camera a central place on its smartphone app for the first time, encouraging users to take more pictures and edit them with digital stickers that show the influence of rival Snapchat.” (Yahoo)

Publisher suing publisher

“In the news and publishing world, there tends to be pretty strong support for protecting free speech and, in particular, strong anti-SLAPP laws. After all, news publishers, are (unfortunately!) frequently targeted in SLAPP suits that are designed solely to shut up a news organization from reporting on something that someone doesn’t like.”

Now, you’ve got “a weird legal battle involving two publishers in nearby Santa Clara, California. The lawsuit was filed by Santa Clara Eagle Publishing and its boss Miles Barber against a guy named Robert Haugh, who just recently started an online-only publication called ‘Santa Clara News Online.'” Haugh written some stuff critical of Barber and Santa Clara Weekly, thus the odd litigation.(Techdirt)

Need a tote bag?

If you inexplicably — well, it’s explicable — don’t associate the New York Review of Books with comics, you might since it unveiled its first New York Review Comic via Mark Beyer’s Agony. So it’s proudly produced “some of the best, strangest, most exciting comics we know—from a Pop-Art dystopia to delicate memoir to the finest in cowboy jokes—and join in the long NYRB tradition of inventive, witty, and beautiful storytelling.”

So it’s offering “all NYR Comics titles, along with a few of our other favorite books, at 30% off. Order $50 or more and we’ll include a free NYR Comics tote bag.” (New York Review of Books)

Tronc turmoil

So “Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire doctor in Los Angeles and a major shareholder in the newspaper publisher Tronc, has sent a letter to Tronc’s board accusing the company of ‘poor corporate governance’ and asking for access to its books and records.” (The New York Times)

The doc was beckoned to the company by Michael Ferro, a Chicago tech mini-mogul and the iconoclastic boss, and now are both trying to be king of the hill, with Soon-Shiong seemingly short of the needed board votes.

What’s the lesson here?

Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert, tells me: “Tronc continues to add insult to injury — and some more injury, too — with its apparently endless series of governance atrocities. Ferro seems incapable of understanding the basic principle that shareowners have rights, and Dr. Soon-Shiong is clearly right that the stock has a ‘governance discount,’ reflecting the lack of trust investors have in this management team and board of directors.”

Limits to Kushner’s multitasking

While some White House reporters were grousing about whom they’d invite to their dinner, they missed this:

“Admitting there was simply too much on his plate right now to bring stability to the fractious region by end of day Friday, Senior Advisor to the President Jared Kushner quietly moved the task ‘solve Middle East crisis’ to his to-do list for next week, sources reported Tuesday.”

“’Ushering in lasting peace across the Mideast is definitely still a big priority for me, but given everything else I’ve got going on right now, I’m just going to need to bump it to next week when I have a little more time on my hands,’ Kushner reportedly said as he crossed out the task on his pocket day planner and rewrote it on the following page, acknowledging that he was just ‘too swamped’ at the moment with policy reports and real estate development meetings to resolve the numerous wars, land disputes, and centuries-old ethnic and religious tensions that have long raged among the 350 million residents of the geopolitical hotspot.”

At least somebody from Foreign Policy magazine was paying attention. Oh, wrong outlet. My bad. It was The Onion.

Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.

Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here.

British reporter Iona Craig went to the al Ghayil, the Yemeni town stormed by Navy SEALs in the raid that President Trump says was a great success even as it claimed the life of the operator whose widow was honored at his joint address to Congress.

Her reporting for The Intercept, assisted by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, would appear to demolish the Trump claims. At bare minimum, it’s what Kellyanne Conway might call “alternative facts” to those her boss has proffered.

“With the SEALs taking heavy fire on the lower slopes, attack helicopters swept over the hillside hamlet above,” writes Craig, formerly the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London and editor of the Yemen Times. “In what seemed to be blind panic, the gunships bombarded the entire village, striking more than a dozen buildings, razing stone dwellings where families slept, and wiping out more than 120 goats, sheep, and donkeys.”

Craig, a onetime serious horse racer, was one of the last correspondents accredited in Yemen and has snuck into the country on occasion. This time she talks to many villagers and, combining those accounts with insight from current and former military officials, concludes it was not the “highly successful” operation Trump claims, “from the description of an assault on a fortified compound — there are no compounds or walled-off houses in the village — to the ‘large amounts of vital intelligence’ the president said were collected.”

And this: “According to a current U.S. special operations adviser and a former senior special operations officer, it was not intelligence the Pentagon was after but a key member of al Qaeda. The raid was launched in an effort to capture or kill Qassim al Rimi, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to the special operations adviser, who asked to remain anonymous because details behind the raid are classified.”

As for the women killed, this casts doubts on the Pentagon claim that some were armed and fought U.S. forces from “pre-established positions.” But all witnesses interviewed for this piece call that balderdash, “citing a culture that views the prospect of women fighting as ‘eib’ — shameful and dishonorable — and pointing out the practical implausibility of women clutching babies while also firing rifles. A CENTCOM spokesperson refused to provide any details about female fighters to support its assertion.”

The Intercept’s nexus with the Pulitzer Center is revealing. The latter funds top-notch overseas journalism and has partnered with an A-list of media, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, “The NewsHour” on PBS and The Washington Post, among many others. Its track record is impressive.

This effort concludes with a tribesman who underscored that, once again, we haven’t made many new friends in the region.

As he and Craig finished a chat at dusk, he declared, “If they (the SEALs) come back, tell them to bring their caskets. From now we are ready for any fight with the Americans and the dog Trump.” (The Intercept)

Bidding for Time

“A group that includes Jahm Najafi, chief executive of private investment firm Najafi Cos., and private-equity firm Pamplona Capital Management, has emerged as a bidder for Time Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.” (The Wall Street Journal)

Joe Ricketts does some editing

“After online local news outlet DNAinfo announced Wednesday it was buying Gothamist LLC, the parent company that owns the Chicagoist and runs four other similar news websites across the country, some media observers noticed something was missing from the archives of the newly acquired sites: A number of negative stories about Joe Ricketts, DNAinfo’s owner and patriarch of the family that owns a controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs, had been deleted.” (Patch)

Writes Techdirt, “Put together, here’s what we’re left with: Gothamist proactively took down posts critical of the family that owns the company in discussions about acquiring it and attempted to explain it by stating something that isn’t true. How is that not worse than if Joe Ricketts himself had demanded the takedown of the articles?”

Terrific sports journalism

The best sports journalism is, quite often, not really about sports. That’s true of Marc Tracy and Dan Barry’s exploration of the institutional disaster at Baylor University spawned by rape and football. “Collectively, the cases have become a cautionary parable for modern-day college athletics, one in which a Christian university seemed to lose sight of its core values in pursuit of football glory and protected gridiron heroes who preyed on women.” (The New York Times) And, at the top of the pecking order, exhibiting rather gross situational ethics at times, was none other than Ken Starr, the velvet shiv of the Bill Clinton era.

Plagiarism is not confined to journalists

“Art Market Monitor (via Le Monde) reports that a French court has ruled in favor of the estate of the photographer Jean-François Bauret in a plagiarism case against the American artist Jeff Koons. Heirs to the now-deceased artist successfully argued that the 1988 Koons piece Naked is a contrefaçon (or “counterfeit”) of a 1975 photograph by Bauret, who was known for his nude portraits.” (ARTnews)

Sam Donaldson on White House briefings

There’s nobody in the White House press corps who can match Sam Donaldson for effectively exploiting cameras at the daily press briefing to their professional advantage. It’s why one might do a double take in hearing Donaldson say the cameras should go.

In a new C-SPAN podcast interview, he says that he very belatedly agrees with Mike McCurry, who believes he erred 22 years ago in approving cameras as a Bill Clinton press secretary. In sum, it’s a belief that theatrics have gone up, lack of substantive candor have gone down.

Yes, he had a self-interest that the TV folks could “show our wares,” said the longtime ABC News stalwart now retired in New Mexico. But, “I think they’ve turned into a P.R. show by the press secretary and a demonstration by some reporters to show how tough they are,” says Donaldson, who was barely accused of erring to the side of the understated in his public performances. (C-Span)

“Sam Donaldson covered 8 presidents and his presence was legendary at The White House,” reminds C-SPAN’s Steve Scully, a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association who hosts “The Sidebar” podcast. “He knew what questions to ask and more importantly, how to ask them. So yes, it is fascinating to now hear his thoughts today on televised briefings.”

Of course, you could argue that the reflexive evasions, and deceits, of the Trump White House argue for more, not less coverage. Seeing can be believing.

And, as Jonathan Alter tells me, “Televising the briefing has only one benefit — material for SNL, which is no small thing when we all need the laughs from Melissa McCarthy. But Spicer lies nearly as much as his boss and spends the rest of the time spinning, which means he’s close to useless in helping provide an accurate picture of what the Trump Administration is doing to the country. If the briefings aren’t televised, fewer reporters will go, freeing up time for them to do more real reporting (and there has been some great work) instead of stenography.”

A meal that Anthony Bourdain apparently missed

From Breitbart: “CNN’s Reza Aslan faces backlash after eating part of a human brain while filming with Hindu cannibal sect“

Got any Netflix stock?

“On the eight-year anniversary of the bull market following the 2009 stock market bottom, the ‘Fast Money’ traders said Netflix is the stock to buy out of the six best-performing stocks since the financial crisis.” (CNBC)

New tool looks like the old one

“Google’s workplace tools, called G Suite, is splitting its Hangouts app into two parts — Hangouts Meet for video chat, and Hangouts Chat — which looks a lot like Slack.” Its “rooms” and threaded conversations don’t enthrall Recode.

The morning babble

“Let’s talk about Obamacare” is how “Fox & Friends'” Ainsley Earhardt opened the show this morning, like so many moms and dads at breakfast tables (not). A few minutes later, Stuart Varney heralded how an economic “explosion of confidence and optimism precisely coincides with the election of Donald Trump on Nov. 8th.” So call your broker, tell them Stu sent you and invest the kids’ college fund in the market.

CNN’s “New Day” went with the network’s rather complex (or just confusing) tale — a follow to stories on Slate and The New York Times — on the FBI looking into an “odd” computer relationship between a Russian bank and Trump’s organization.

It involves a computer server, with reporters Pamela Brown and Jose Pagliery both intriguing but, ah, well, complicated about a probe involving the FBI’s counter-intelligence unit. “There could be an innocuous explanation,” said Brown, who can’t be accused of a hard sell on the tale.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” was aghast over the ineptitude of the Trump White House of letting Michael Flynn into their midst even as he was getting paid big bucks as a foreign lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign in which Trump was bashing Hillary Clinton “pay to play.” And there was lots of Obamacare talk, with Joe Scarborough reminding us (did you know?!) that he was once a congressman.

A real live broadsheet newspaper

The aforementioned Jon Alter got home to Montclair, New Jersey Thursday to find the first edition of a new broadsheet weekly, Montclair Local. (Poynter) It’s a noble attempt to fill a void in local coverage in a lovely 36,000-populaton suburb that’s got so many journalists, The New York Times could probably get by with just its staff who live there.

It’s initially financed by a couple without any media background but concerned, as were others, with a decline in local coverage partly explained by Gannett cuts at the mainstay Montclair Times. It will be printed at a Middletown, New York newspaper and delivered by the Postal Service.

Alter loved his first edition and Merrill Brown, a journalist-entrepreneur who just finished five years as de facto founder of the Montclair State University School of Communication and Media, says, “Too print-centric will fail from a business standpoint. But the region needs new voices and I am hopeful that this team is creating one.”

Headline of day

“I don’t trust anyone — except my wife.”

That’s Republican consultant William F. B. O’Reilly in a Newsday op-ed on why he doesn’t trust Trump’s claims of Obama wiretaps, or intelligence agencies’ denials, or clergy, pollsters, judges, Mark Levin, Bill Cosby, you name it. (Newsday)

Don’t you wish you could walk out of some meetings?

Miffed with how you’re treated in the newsroom? “American International Group Inc. Chief Executive Peter Hancock, apparently having lost the faith of the insurer’s directors, quit at a board meeting Wednesday where his future was being discussed, according to people familiar with the matter.” (The Wall Street Journal)

“Lonesome Rex”

As tipped here, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is conveniently claiming he’s got to take a smaller plane for a big Asia trek and thus probably can’t accommodate the traditional press pool. (Poynter)

CNN’s Jake Tapper rightly tweeted that this was insulting “to any American who is looking for anything but a state-run version of events.” The logistics and costs of getting to where he’s going are formidable for any but the most well-heeled media outlets. Even then, it might be very difficult in following a man employing what seems an ExxonMobil School of Media Deflection from his previous gig.

Dating ourselves

Jonathan Salant finished his White House pool duty yesterday by telling colleagues at 6:01 p.m. that there was a so-called lid called and his day of “covering” Trump was done. Then came this:

“In the words of the former WNEW-TV 10 O’Clock News anchor Bill Jorgensen, ‘thanking you for your time this time ’til next time.'”

Ah, Jorgensen retired in 1987. Sheesh, to think I get accused of dated cultural references! So as the late Roger Grimsby, a wonderfully cynical Jorgensen competitor of sorts at WABC-TV (who died in 1995), signed-off, “Hoping your news is good news,” have a good weekend.

Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.

Correction: A previous version of this newsletter referred to “Sam Donald.” We meant Sam Donaldson.

George Osborne will earn £650,000 a year for working four days a month at BlackRock, more than ten times what he is paid as an MP once expected share awards from the world’s largest fund manager are included.

The detail of Mr Osborne’s pay at BlackRock, which he agreed to join as an adviser earlier this year, was disclosed in the register of members’ financial interests at the House of Commons on Wednesday.

The disclosure came on Budget day, which Mr Osborne watched from the backbenches. It also revealed that he earned £786,450 last year from giving 15 speeches — mostly to financial institutions.

The most he earned for speaking was the £81,174 and £60,578 he was paid for two speeches at JPMorgan’s New York headquarters lasting a total of seven hours last October.

The former chancellor earned £15,081 for a speech at Lloyds Bank — which is part-owned by the government — in February 2016, but he gave this to a charity in his local constituency.

The 45-year-old became a part-time senior adviser at the BlackRock Investment Institute, the US group’s research arm, in February. He expects to spend a day a week working for the institute.

On top of being paid £13,542 a day by BlackRock, Mr Osborne said he expected to receive an unspecified amount of shares in the asset manager.

The share-based bonus is likely to take his annual income from the US group above $1m, according to a person familiar with the matter, but it will vest over three years and the amount he receives each year will depend on the company’s performance and the value of its shares.

BlackRock has said Mr Osborne will give his views and advice on European politics and policy, Chinese economic reform and trends such as low yields and longevity and their impact on retirement planning. It added that he will not engage in any lobbying of the British government. He joins Rupert Harrison, his former economic adviser, who has been a strategist at BlackRock since 2015.

The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, a government body, has approved the job. As a backbencher Mr Osborne is paid £74,000 a year for doing his day job; as a cabinet minister he received nearly £70,000 more.

In Wednesday’s disclosure, Mr Osborne revealed that Countrywide Developments, the property company, donated £8,023 for him and a member of staff to travel by helicopter and car to the Ripon North Conservatives’ Summer Reception last July.

Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and head of the eponymous media company, donated £4,087 for Mr Osborne to attend a dinner he organised in Paris last October.

BlackRock manages $5.1tn of client money to invest across financial markets. As such it has become one of the most powerful financial companies and takes pains to build strong relationships with governments around the world.

Mr Osborne left office last July after six years at the Treasury. Last summer he joined the elite Washington Speakers Bureau, following in the footsteps of former prime ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who both earned speaking fees through the agency after leaving office.

In addition to his lucrative speaking and business engagements, the former chancellor is also spending time building the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a think-tank he launched late last year.

Mr Osborne this year became a Kissinger fellow on a US academic programme run by the McCain Institute, which is backed by Republican senator John McCain and provides the former chancellor with £120,212 to cover his costs.

Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here.

So what have you heard more often: “Fox & Friends” shilling for President Trump or sophisticated people confiding their real reason for reading The New Yorker is the cartoons?

Ah, if only Bob Mankoff had long ago negotiated some piece of the action in a monetizable marketplace of knowing guffaws. He could have turned the reactions of so many readers each week into a fancy estate in the Hamptons.

As displayed in an HBO documentary, “Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists,” Mankoff has long been the magazine’s cartoon editor. He’s been an eclectic and free spirit who’s helped a very distinct mix of fun and sophistication into an iconic journalism staple.

Now, he’s moving on to other challenges, as editor David Remnick disclosed to the staff:

“We are going to have a change. After more than two decades as cartoon editor, the incomparable Bob Mankoff is stepping aside from that post and assuming what is arguably a higher post, that of a regularly contributing artist. In addition to going back to the drawing board with greater frequency, Bob will edit an ambitious new anthology, ‘The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons,’ and will continue to work with Condé Nast on redeveloping the Cartoon Bank, which he founded and ran for many successful years.”

“Bob has been a remarkable and innovative partner to me, as he was to Tina Brown. He brought a real sense of originality to this work, but, even more important, a sense of the artists and their interests. He has brought everyone’s best work to the table and managed a complicated balancing act with grace, sustaining the work of people who have been publishing in The New Yorker for many years while bringing new artists into the mix, including more diverse voices and views of the world.”

“A huge antic talent and wonderful wry observer,” Brown said last evening. “I saw how special he was immediately and will always be proud I made him the cartoon editor of The New Yorker.”

He’ll be succeeded by Emma Allen, who served as a Talk of the Town editor, a writer and “the driving force behind Daily Shouts, which is one of the best features of newyorker.com,” Remnick wrote.

Chicago-based New Yorker cartoonist Pat Byrnes says, “Bob Mankoff sees thousands of individual cartoons each week, but what he looks for are individual voices. And then he cultivates them, as he did mine. Mankoff gave me my big break, not simply by buying a cartoon, but by buying into me as a cartoonist.”

“And it’s amazing he can do that for me and so many other cartoonists he has brought into the magazine. The number of cartoons he sees each week would numb anyone else’s sense of humor. But Bob has a sense for humor. He not only sees what is funny, but why it’s funny.”

And, yet, says Byrnes, he seems to take it all quite seriously. “Some of it’s an act. He loves to wear the persona of the crusty New York cynic, but inside he’s still a gangly, insecure, smart aleck kid. That’s evident in his most famous cartoon, ‘No, Thursday’s out. How about never? Is never good for you?’ No surprise, the cartoon was autobiographical. He can be deadly serious and outrageously silly in the same breath.”

Oh, a final thing noted by Byrnes that involved not Mankoff but Remnick and the art of leadership. It’s a little thing, but one that editors everywhere should note, especially those who increasingly rely on (and, in many cases, shaft) freelancers and other needy journalists.

“The important detail to cartoonists is the ‘2:32 p.m.’ part,” Byrnes noted, referencing the time on the email Remnick sent to the magazine’s editorial staff.

“Remnick’s email to the cartoonists arrived one minute earlier,” Byrnes said. “I know that’s not much, but it speaks well for Remnick that he informed the cartoonists first.”

Snap’s IPO

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ self-inflicted wounds were the obsession of much of the national press. But a similar professional mania was presented by the Snap IPO, a combo Super Bowl/World Series/State of the Union Address for the financial press. (Poynter)

Yes, there were CNBC and Fox Business Channel, along with Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal (live-blogging) and specialty tech publications. There was also Cheddar, the millennial-focused business news operation, that covered it like a blanket, replete with live coverage on its site and via other outlets it partners with, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Jon Steinberg, Cheddar’s founder and primary co-host, thought the initial pricing of Snap was “nuts.” “Does Wall Street understand what they’re investing in?” asked Kristen Scholer, his co-host. A fair number of analysts suggested not and that Snap would prove to be more like an overhyped Twitter than a Facebook.

My favorite quip came on Fox Business. There, Steve Cortes, chief strategist for BGC Partners, said, with no ambiguity, “I think this is a fool’s errand. It reminds me of Ponce de Leon chasing the Fountain of Youth. Well, this is a stock version of that.”

But, as Bloomberg reported at day’s end, “Snap Inc.’s Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy each added $1.6 billion to his fortune Thursday after shares in the photo-sharing mobile app closed at $24.48, 44 percent above their listing price.”

“Investor appetite for the first technology listing of the year boosted the net worth of each co-founder to $5.3 billion, propelling Spiegel, 26, and Murphy, 28, up more than 150 places on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s 500 richest people.”

Sessions’ announcement

After the attorney general disclosed that he was recusing himself from any Trump-Russia investigations, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith went to the Justice Department and Catherine Herridge, their chief intelligence correspondent.

I was standing by a locker room TV as she voiced a subtle suspicion about the whole Sessions defense and noted, too, how his meeting with the Russian ambassador came at a similar period in which the FBI was looking into Russian campaign hacking and Trump was doing a softball interview from the Russian-owned RT network.

Her implication was clear: At minimum, the meeting with Sessions was part of a larger, concerted effort by the Russians.

“On Fox News, no less!” declared an older fellow wrapped in his post-shower towel a few feet from me.

Amazon’s screw-up

“Amazon blamed human error for the big AWS outage that took down a bunch of large internet sites for several hours on Tuesday afternoon.” (Recode)

“In a blog post, the company said that one of its employees was debugging an issue with the billing system and accidentally took more servers offline than intended. That error started a domino effect that took down two other server subsystems and so on and so on.”

Well, just don’t put the guy in charge of the Oscars envelopes next year.

Speaking of which…

“A PricewaterhouseCoopers representative says that the firm has enlisted a security service for Brian Cullinan, the accountant responsible for handing over the incorrect envelope that led to ‘La La Land’ being announced as best picture rather than actual winner ‘Moonlight,’ and his colleague, Martha Ruiz.” (Hollywood Reporter)

And this footnote: “Before he became famous for his involvement in handing over the wrong envelope on Sunday’s telecast, he’d been angling for a spot on the stage, Variety has learned. Cullinan had pitched Oscar producers on doing a sketch involving him and his colleague Martha Ruiz, interacting with host Jimmy Kimmel.” (Variety)

Validation

“Washington Post reporter: Democrats ‘are overplaying their hand’ on Sessions,” declared the screaming Breitbart headline.

It was based on a tweet from Philip Bump, a Washington Post correspondent: “Put together a timeline on what Sessions did and said, and am now thinking that Dems are overplaying their hand.” (@pbump)

He might have saved us the opinion and just left us with his timeline. But, hey, the line between reporting and commentary is by and large shredded.

Headlines

Slate: “The administration’s Russia scandal shows no sign of stopping“

National Review: “The perjury allegation against Jeff Sessions is meritless“

The New York Times: “Kushner and Flynn met with Russian envoy in December, White House says.”

Mid-course correction

So Tucker Carlson was the preferred venue of absolution for Jeff Sessions last evening, an interview that didn’t go especially well for Sessions — notably with Carlson’s opening query about why he never corrected the Senate record when he knew it was wrong — and included a mid-course correction phoned in during the mild interrogation.

As MSNBC’s Brian Williams underscored on his later show — “4 minutes and 39 seconds later” were the words set across a black background on an otherwise empty screen — a Sessions aide called the show after Carlson indicated that Sessions had met twice with the ambassador and spoken once by phone.

Carlson told viewers, and Sessions, that his aide indicated there’s been no phone call. Sessions, who didn’t have the best of days and remains unpersuasive on why he didn’t correct his Senate testimony earlier, then responded that, “I don’t recall any such call.”

Whether such live on-air fact-checking will impact the future of American media is unclear. And give Carlson credit for asking Sessions why he and aides never corrected the record of his Senate testimony.

Bad burn? Try tilapia

STAT, the fine site on the health sciences, on Thursday put up a video on how doctors in a Brazilian city use sterilized skin from tilapia as bandages for second- and third-degree burns.

According to Matt Orr, their head of video, by Thursday evening, they’d passed six million Facebook views on the video, with about 500,000 comments, 100,000 shares, 50,000 reactions and 10,000 link clinks back to the article itself.

That was all in 12 hours.

The morning babble

Even the “Fox & Friends” spin on Jeff Sessions situation came up short as it replayed a snippet of his hear-no-evil-see-no-evil performance with Tucker Carlson. Co-host Brian Kilmeade even blamed Sen. Al Franken’s “tortured question” as the problem. Yes, blame the messenger.

CNN’s “New Day” touched upon the politics of the mess and whether a few Republicans can be brought into an anti-Sessions fold. The New York Times’ Patrick Healy finds a “drip, drip, drip” of Trump acolytes meeting with Russians and presenting a political, if not legal quandary, while co-host Chris Cuomo argued that President Hillary Clinton would have been hammered far worse if confronted with the same facts.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” found “too many tough questions” remaining, as Joe Scarborough put it, in particular Sessions seemingly self-serving memory lapses. Pundit John Heilemann dumped on him, too, notably his remembering some exchanges but not others that might just be more incriminating. “There are a lot of things that just don’t ring true.”

Meanwhile, I asked Watergate figure-turned-author John Dean for his take: “Sessions is in deep trouble, and his press conference today was certainly not on the advice of counsel.”

Solid fashion journalism

“In the corner of Detective Sergeant Kevin Ives’ central London office are cardboard boxes full of fakes; lookalike Nike trainers, Michael Kors handbags and Ugg sheepskin boots. The haul is just a tiny fraction of the global market in counterfeit goods — worth over $450 billion — that Ives’ 14-strong specialized police unit is dedicated to slowing.” (Business of Fashion)

A lawsuit gets ditched

“The saga of game developer Digital Homicide whipped through our pages like an idiotic windstorm,” Techdirt opens with rhetorical gentility. “This gust of blustery nonsense started with the company’s lawsuit against a game critic, Jim Sterling, then moved on to it suing Steam users over reviews they wrote, before twirling into the stage where Valve banned Digital Homicide games from Steam entirely and the company stated it planned to shut down operations.”

“Still, the resolution of the threats against Steam users wasn’t the end of the story. The lawsuit against Sterling was still out there, a $10 million dollar anvil hanging over the game critic’s head. Until this week, that is, when the court in which the suit had been filed dismissed it with prejudice as part of a settlement agreement between the two parties.”

Insurance fraud

Now here’s a beat to create in newsrooms: insurance fraud. The New York Law Journal has an insurance fraud column, with attorney Evan Krinick now highlighting how “Social Media Is Shining Light on Fraudulent Insurance Claims.”

Last night

On “CBS Evening News,” Jan Crawford , the chief legal correspondent and my former colleague, said there’s no way that her fellow Alabaman Jeff Session should be prosecuted for perjury before Congress. And David Martin was very good on a longtime bete noire of Sen. John McCain: the suspect construction strategies and outrageous cost overruns of the unfinished $13 billion aircraft carrier on which Trump spoke yesterday.

NBC’s “Nightly News” agreed about the irrelevance of any perjury prosecution and Chuck Todd argued the Russian mess could not just consume the White House legislation agenda but even “this presidency” unless some independent apparatus is formed to investigate. Hmmm.

ABC’s “World News Tonight” melded Sessions with David Muir’s local tabloid TV aplomb: “the deadly police chase, the disturbing video now emerging, the teen pulled from his pickup truck by deputies tazing him, the deputy with his knee on the young man’s neck…” Then, “the damaging winds, the ice-covered highways, the pile-up and trees coming down, and tonight the blast of cold now moving in.” And, finally, “video from inside this home and the warning tonight for families across the country when you put your house on the market.”

“Vice News Tonight” on HBO did inform of how the Syrian Army, backed by Russia, retook an ancient city and how Sweden (anxious about the Russians) is approving mandatory military service for men and men at age 18. Its own Sessions coverage was duplicative of its broadcasting competitors and, on possible actions, mentioned a special prosecutor. “Think Ken Starrand the Monica Lewinsky case,” as if many of its target audience of millennials know of either.

Slow down, you’re moving too fast…

As the Sessions mess stumbles on, even the Russians are apparently nonplussed.

“Working frantically to readjust the schedule they had outlined back in June 2015, Russian officials admitted to reporters Thursday that they have been left scrambling after seeing their plan to delegitimize Western democracy move much faster than they had intended.”

Might Vladimir Putin admit same, say, to Charlie Rose? Perhaps. But, for starters, read about it in The Onion.

Well, I plan to try to delegitimize unceasing parental intrusions in youth sports over the weekend, with soccer and basketball games — and the politics-filled draft for teams in a youth summer baseball league (not to mention parents night at a ballroom dancing class for kids). Cheers.

Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.

In a Facebook post, Barbara Tyler is merciless.

“Hey, did anyone think of proofreading your headline today before the paper went to press? I am pretty sure Trump did not replace his vice president. Fake news at its best. Sometimes I wonder why I continue to subscribe to your paper.”

Tyler was responding to an extraordinary slip-up by The Bryan College-Station Eagle. The Texas newspaper’s top headline on Feb. 21 incorrectly indicated that Lt. Gen. McMaster would be replacing Vice President Mike Pence — rather than the outgoing National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Media corrections are usually met with a mixture of guffaws and finger-wagging, even though fessing up to errors in public is the best way journalists can hold themselves accountable. (At Poynter, we love media corrections).

Something seems to have changed in recent months, however.

Corrected articles are being heralded by critics of mainstream media as evidence that they, too, publish fake news. The term was appropriated by President Trump and disaffected readers to denote any journalistic misstep (as predicted by John Herrman back in November). This is significantly different from its original definition: willingly fabricated articles constructed primarily for financial gain.

Kelly Brown, the editor of The Eagle, published an apology last week that clearly reflected this new milieu of cynicism and distrust.

“The Eagle’s mistake was not a deliberate untruth or an alternative truth,” she wrote. “It was an error made on deadline without enough back-up to catch the oversight. That falls on me.”

Which raises the question: In readers’ eyes, is there a difference between “fake” news and wrong news? The credibility of traditional media outlets seems to hinge in large part on the answer to this question.

The Eagle’s error was embarrassing and prominent, but relatively harmless. Other media errors, like some fake news, have had a very real negative impact.

Six years ago, Capt. Mark Kelly was on a borrowed jet plane rushing from Houston to Tucson, Arizona when, alongside his mother and two daughters, he heard the news. NPR was reporting that his wife, Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, had died after being shot in the head during a town hall meeting.

“We lived with that for about 15 or 20 minutes…that was the lowest of the low point,” Kelly would tell NPR 11 days after the fact. “It was the most shocking moment of my life,” he later wrote.

Still mid-air, Kelly got ahold of the congresswoman’s chief of staff, Pia Carusone. Carusone was in Tucson and could refute the NPR report. Giffords was in surgery, alive.

NPR made the call based on information from two sources: someone from the local sheriff’s office and a member of Congress. Both were wrong. NPR tried to correct its mistake. The next day it published an extensive apology from the executive editor for news. A revised ethics handbook issued a year later dedicated an entry to this incident.

Mark Stencel was NPR’s digital editor during the Tucson shooting. I heard him recount the story of this monumental mess-up for the first time in 2016 to a Duke journalism class.

Towards the end of his lecture, he choked up. Five years had passed since that day; his remorse had not.

The shooting was on a Saturday, and Stencel was still at home calling in reinforcements when NPR made the mistake. While on the phone with his boss, his eye caught the chyron on MSNBC carrying the NPR report.

“It was a big system failure,” he told me when we spoke for this article. Communications and editing processes failed.

“This was a really painful and horrible mistake,” Stencel said. “And as bad as we felt about it, we knew we had made a lot of other people feel a lot worse. It was just awful.

Less than six months later, Stencel attended a National Press Club luncheon. The main speaker was NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

Also at the luncheon was Kelly, who had recently announced his retirement from the space agency.

NPR had apologized to Kelly in January; Stencel did so again. While the astronaut stressed the report had been devastating for him and his family, he was also “just so remarkably gracious,” Stencel recalls. (Americans for Responsible Solutions, the gun violence advocacy organization that Kelly has since co-founded, did not return an email seeking a comment to this story).

The two errors — and their corrections — are six years apart, almost to the date.

NPR’s 2011 Facebook post linking to the executive editor’s apology has 379 comments. Several commenters were upset, and a handful suggested systemic flaws led the organization to jump to conclusions. No one, however, accused NPR of deliberately misinforming the public. Many were appreciative of the apology.

The Eagle’s apology gathered far fewer comments. But on both the website and Facebook, a handful of readers were denouncing the mistake as fake news.

One reader, Brown noted in her apology, determined that the McMaster-Pence slip-up was evidence The Eagle was “alt-left liberal media pushing fake news.”

One commenter wrote “Right, The Eagle is a typical fake news liberal site that posts propaganda and B.S. How pathetic you are to be so ignorant and unprofessional.” Another asked, “How could anyone miss a front page title like that?? Knowing you were against Trump. Just proves there is fake news out there.”

Brown told Poynter that several early calls and emails the newsroom were in this timbre. They were “fairly ugly, with many not seeing this as a slip-up or oversight,” she said.

Angered readers suggested the Eagle error was either aimed at confusing the public, or evidence that “subconsciously, the copy editor must have wished that Pence was being replaced.”

Neither of these scenarios was true. The copy editor had written a headline about Pence further down on the front page before moving to the main story; the vice president was still in the back of their mind. The paper usually has two copy-editors, but not that night. An interim city editor proofing pages didn’t spot the error.

It was an inexcusable mistake, but not a premeditated one.

With journalists themselves disagreeing over the meaning of the term fake news, it is not surprising that some readers think it should also apply to corrected media errors.

Is there a difference between the two? It’s worth asking, said Mark Memmott, NPR’s supervising senior editor for standards and practices.

“I don’t think it’s that obvious a question,” he said.

“To me, a mistake by a credible news organization is going to happen,” he said. “Mistakes will happen. We are human beings. A credible news organization sets out to tell the truth. Occasionally it will make mistakes. Those who are spreading the fake news aren’t worried about the truth.”

Brown and Stencel also think errors are fundamentally different from fake news.

“There’s certainly a difference in intent,” Stencel said. “We sure as hell weren’t trying to mislead anybody.”

“Our error was based on actual reporting and grounded in talking to people, not making assumptions. Those people were wrong and we didn’t vet what they told us as aggressively as we should have. But it was based on real reporting…one of our sources was the sheriff’s office.”

“What could the paper possibly gain by printing something so outrageously incorrect?” Brown said. “Absolutely nothing. It hurts our credibility.”

The distinction between fake news and wrong news echoes that between a falsehood and a lie in the political sphere, also a subject of discussion recently.

Not all readers are resorting to shouting “fake news,” though. Many Eagle readers reacted the same way that NPR’s listeners did in 2011.

Brown published her phone number in The Eagle’s apology and promised to return any calls that went to voicemail. The morning after the column was published in print, Brown’s work phone had received more missed calls than it could acknowledge — it simply stated “100+” — and 85 voicemails, of which only 40 had been stored.

Brown received calls from people who identified with making big mistakes, including a retired police officer.

“Tell your copy editor this: We once served a warrant at the wrong address. That could have gotten one of us killed. Fortunately for all involved, we were fine, but the point is our mistakes can get us killed. Your mistakes can’t.”

Memmott doesn’t think fake news-calling has become the norm, either.

“A minority want to use the fact that we do make mistakes and that we do correct…as evidence against us for what they see as quote-unquote fake news,” he said. “But I don’t think a majority have changed…A majority of people appreciate the fact that we correct the mistakes we make.”

“Mistakes are not going to go away, agrees Stencel.

“Given what it is that we are trying to do, news organizations are going to make mistakes,” he says. “It is an unavoidable byproduct of the reporting process, like nuclear waste. That’s why corrections are so important.”

“Corrections policies are not universally adopted or uniformly implemented across newsrooms. In many countries, reporting errors are usually dispatched with stealth edits or unannounced takedowns of the incriminating article.

During the terrorist attacks that rocked Europe in 2016, for instance, several Italian media outlets mistakenly used photos from other incidents to accompany the news. To my knowledge, they never apologized. One article still shows gruesome photos from a Johannesburg robbery in an article about the Munich Olympia mall shooting last summer.

No major Italian publication has a corrections policy maintained with anywhere near the rigor of that managed by major media outlets in the United Kingdom and United States. Even within the U.S., corrections are handled very heterogeneously.

With trust in the media at record lows, rigorous corrections policies need to be defended and expanded.

This may be hard because corrections often attract larger audiences than the original stories — to content that is embarrassing for the news organization. The Eagle’s apology was still the second most-read piece on the website five days after it was published. It drew in about five times as much traffic as an average article, Brown said. Poynter’s annual roundups of media corrections are always a hit with readers.

“Lol #fakenews” cannot become a standard, reflexive reaction to media corrections, though.

Corrections are a fundamental building block for trustworthy journalism, according to the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Newsrooms that publish corrections more transparently should be rewarded, not punished.

More pre-publication fact-checking should be the key discriminant between credible news organizations and other online information sources. But to presume that all errors can be prevented is to misunderstand human nature.

“We all hope that an emphasis on getting things right the first time will help us avoid mistakes, but it will never eliminate them,” said Memmott.

In this more skeptical ecosystem, media outlets that wish to be taken as credible need to redouble efforts to communicate the uncertainty that hounds credible reporting.

In 2011, NPR’s live blog carried the warning “As happens when a story is just breaking, there are conflicting reports at this moment about what has happened.”

Last year, during the Orlando shooting, the warning was more prominent and more detailed:

“This is a developing story. Some things that get reported by the media will later turn out to be wrong. We will focus on reports from police officials and other authorities, credible news outlets and reporters who are at the scene. We will update as the situation develops.”

Greater openness with readers also requires being available when things go wrong. Brown felt sharing her phone number was a an important part of cleaning up after The Eagle’s mistake.

“We can write explanations all day long, but a conversation tends to go further and allows the reader to ask questions and for us to respond.”

Stencel, now the co-director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab, continues talking about that fateful winter day in 2011.

“It’s not just me doing six years of penance,” he says.

“One thing we try to do in this business is we try to learn from our mistakes. And that is another big difference between real news and fake news.”

Correction: A previous version of this piece incorrectly quoted Stencel. He said “a lot worse,” not “a lot worst.” We apologize for the error.

The Louisiana State Police never did tell White what happened to his son. He learned of their account through a news release posted online that evening, March 3, 2014. The police said that Victor White III, while detained in the back seat of a locked police car, his hands shackled behind his back, had committed suicide by shooting himself in the back with a handgun that an officer had not found during an earlier search.

New Iberia, a small city surrounded by sugar cane 100 miles west of New Orleans, is bisected by railroad tracks. North of the tracks, where residents are predominantly white, most believed that Victor White III committed suicide. In the largely black neighborhoods south of the tracks, most residents shared the Whites’ conviction that their son was executed by the cops. In the months of heartbreak and rage that followed, New Iberians tended to believe the official account of the “Houdini suicide” to the extent that they approved of the performance of Louis Ackal, the sheriff of Iberia Parish.

Ackal — who declined multiple requests for comment for this article — was the most powerful man in town and perhaps the most popular. A fourth-generation New Iberian, he was a southern Louisiana politician in the old mold: charismatic and irascible, given to country bromides and plain-spoken provocations, antagonistic to the regional press and civil-liberties groups, chummy with the political class, a friend to many and a bully to the rest. He smoked cigars and kicked his boots onto his desk during meetings. He had come to office as a reformer, pledging to bring integrity to the police force and criminals to justice — to, as he put it in a campaign speech, clean up “a terrible mess.” To the satisfaction of a plurality of voters, he had succeeded.

At Ackal’s request, the state police opened an investigation into the death. Additional investigations were later started by the F.B.I., the United States attorney’s office for the Western District of Louisiana and the Justice Department’s civil rights division. But the man best suited to investigate the strange death of Victor White III — the man with the most intimate knowledge of New Iberia, its legacy of racial conspiracy, the inner workings of the sheriff’s office — was the victim’s father. The Rev. Victor White was motivated by grief, anger and a desire for justice, but that was not all. He was also haunted by the fear that his own actions, his own history in New Iberia, might have led to his son’s death.

Victor White III, whom everyone called Little Vic, was the sixth of nine children and the Whites’ youngest son. (One of the older brothers, Victor White Jr., is known as Junior.) Little Vic inherited his father’s tall, rangy stature; his large, expressive eyes; his exuberant manner. When the brothers got in trouble — when, for instance, they were caught playing in the attic with a sword their father brought back from Korea — Little Vic always took the blame, though he was a terrible liar. He did manage to convince his parents of one thing: After attending a Baptist service and witnessing all the jumping, shouting and singing, he begged his parents to change denominations. Not only did they agree, but Victor Sr., a mental-health and substance-abuse counselor, became ordained as a Baptist minister.

The Whites are not from New Iberia but the longleaf pine region of central Louisiana. They lived in Alexandria, a somewhat larger city with a somewhat broader perspective on questions of class and race. White can trace his family line back to a plantation outside the nearby town of Cheneyville. “My grandmother,” he told me, “was a slave. She was born around 1900. She worked in the cotton field and worked domestic as well.” I took this to mean that she worked under slavelike conditions. White responded forcefully: “She was a slave.”

In late 2006, a pastor in New Iberia called White with a desperate request. The city, which had a long history of racial brutality, was in the throes of a new crisis. The source of the tension, as it had been so many times before, was the annual Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival. The festival was really two festivals: The official festival, held downtown, featured parades, a boat procession down the Bayou Teche and a fais do-do, presided over by the members of a royal court, many drawn from the ancien régime families of prominent planters. The second festival was held across the tracks in the West End, on land that once belonged to the Hopkins sugar plantation. During the Jim Crow era, this second celebration was formalized as the Brown Sugar Festival, with its own parade and a Queen Brown Sugar. In recent years, it had been a looser affair, an occasion for block parties, D.J. sets and joy riding down Hopkins Street, past the shacks with rusted tin roofs, the overgrown lots, the bodegas advertising daiquiris and Wings cigarettes.

On the final day of that year’s festival, after traffic on Hopkins Street came to a standstill, deputies of the New Iberia sheriff’s office fired grenades of tear gas into the black crowds. The sheriff, Sid Hebert, claimed his deputies gassed the revelers out of concern for their health. “It was only a matter of minutes,” he said, “before someone in the crowd would fire a weapon.” In a federal lawsuit, later dismissed, 160 West End residents claimed to have suffered injuries. The oldest claimants grew up under Jim Crow; the youngest was 8 months old.

Hebert expressed remorse about the incident and agreed to meet with local ministers to improve his department’s relationship with the West End. White, who had developed a reputation among Baptist ministers in southern Louisiana for engaging law enforcement on civil rights issues, was asked to serve as mediator. In early 2007, he moved his family to New Iberia. Little Vic was 15.

White helped to open a community center on Hopkins and ran a substance-abuse program that attracted clients from both sides of the tracks, including members of some of the most prominent white families. He began to understand the nature of power in New Iberia and the sinuous channels it pursued. He wanted to make sure his children understood too. He made a point of taking them to the Sugar Cane Festival. Almost immediately, they were stopped and questioned by the police. “It took them for a loop,” White says. “They’d never seen stuff like that in Alexandria. They said: ‘Daddy, what are they stopping us for?’ ”

The Whites rented a house just off Hopkins; there was a working sugar-cane field at the end of their block. They held barbecues and kept their doors open. They spoke about the need to establish a public-transportation system, to rebuild the local elementary school, to encourage children to develop professional ambitions. “If we could get those kids,” White says, “we could get their parents.” White felt he was making progress, particularly when it came to restoring faith in the Sheriff’s Department. He had the sheriff’s cellphone number and called it often. He says he provided leads for criminal investigations and complained when cops behaved arrogantly. But Hebert’s term was up in 2008, and a new sheriff came to town.

In downtown New Iberia, where the millionaires lived, and in the less ostentatious, leafy City Park neighborhood, north of the Bayou Teche, Louis Ackal was welcomed home in 2008 as a savior. Most New Iberians grew up knowing his family, which arrived in south Louisiana in the late 1880s, during the first wave of Lebanese immigration to the United States. For 60 years, the Ackals owned a department store and a shoe store on Main Street. A local bridge that spans the Teche is named for Elias Ackal Jr., known as Bo, who served for more than two decades in the Louisiana House of Representatives. “They were part of the old guard,” says Jarrod Alleman, an oil-field safety specialist who attended school with members of the Ackal family. “All of our elected officials came out of a pool of people who were connected, and it had been like that forever. He was part of the ruling elite.” Yet Alleman, like many on the north side, saw Ackal as a reformer. “He was worldly. He had been places, had done other things. He seemed like a professional, not just someone’s brother-in-law.”

Ackal passed for worldly in New Iberia because he left town three decades earlier to work as a state trooper, serving at one point in the governor’s office, before retiring to a small mountain town in northwest Colorado. He came out of retirement, he said, because he was disturbed by the “horror stories” he had heard about residents’ encounters with the police in his hometown. There was a sense in the community that crime rates were unusually high for a place the size of New Iberia. “I’m not a big fan of politics,” Ackal said in a campaign speech. “The reason I ran was because people told me they were scared in their own homes.” Besides, he added, he missed the “crawfish and crabs and gumbo, and Cajun music.” Ackal ran as a change candidate, pledging to strengthen the internal-affairs unit and repair the relationship between the Sheriff’s Department and residents. He vowed to hire a public-information officer to communicate regularly with the press. He promised transparency, professionalism, strength.

“A lot of people had faith in him,” Julie Comeaux, a stay-at-home mother in the City Park neighborhood, told me. “People looked to him to move us forward.” If anyone could move the community forward, it was the sheriff. Louisiana sheriffs have a staggering measure of power and few checks on it. They collect taxes, run the jails and command the police force. In the smaller cities and parishes, they often hold greater political clout than mayors, parish presidents and businessmen — a power that derives in no small part from their ability to pursue criminal investigations of mayors, parish presidents and businessmen. As Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish once put it, when asked why he declined to run for statewide office: “Why would I want to be governor when I can be king?”

It helped that Ackal’s family was respected on both sides of town. “The Ackals I knew were just wonderful people, personable, sweet,” says Phebe Hayes, a former professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and amateur historian of African-American life in the parish. “They didn’t feel very Old South. More Old World.” Two generations earlier, when black-owned restaurants, upholstery shops and pharmacies thrived in the West End and Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald played in the nightclubs, before it fell into an eerie dilapidated vacancy, the Ackals ran a general store on Hopkins. Ackal boasted of the store while stumping for votes on the West End, White says, which made him suspicious.

“He was intimidating, very arrogant,” White says. “He walked into peoples’ yards. He’d say: ‘My grandfather owned that store. When y’all went in to go shopping, who you think it was? That was my people. We were helping y’all. Y’all owe me.’ ”

White was appalled to find that this argument was persuasive among his neighbors. They told him that he didn’t understand, because he was an outsider. “I said: ‘I do understand. This is what I’m trying to get you out of. Y’all are 40 years behind Alexandria.’ But they thought he was going to help them. That was when I became the villain.”

White met Ackal for the first time at the community center, shortly after the election. It was a brief conversation. “I’m going in a different direction,” White says Ackal told him. Ackal reassigned the West End community liaison, installed a police substation within the community center and fought to increase the size of the jail. White, refusing to concede defeat, remained in New Iberia, working as a substance-abuse counselor.

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On the north side of town, many residents felt that Ackal was making good on his promises. He bought new uniforms and squad cars, to which he affixed bumper stickers reading, “In God We Trust.” When the American Civil Liberties Union complained, Ackal defended the stickers by saying that his officers had accepted God into their lives. “If there is no God,” he said, “then we don’t have a good police officer, do we?” There were rumors of police brutality, though most people on the north side didn’t know anyone who had suffered. “We figured he was corrupt,” says Jarrod Alleman. “We started hearing that things were going on. But they weren’t happening where we were. When I got pulled over for speeding, the cop took a look at my license and said: ‘You live on Oak? I grew up down the street.’ If I were someone else, maybe of a different color, and lived in the West End, I’m 100 percent positive it would have gone down differently.”

It did go down differently in the West End, where the police came to be seen as an occupying army. The jail population surged, the cells becoming so overcrowded that inmates were forced to sleep on the floor. Following Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Ackal punished prisoners by dressing them in hot pink jumpsuits and making them sleep in a pink cell he called the Flamingo Hotel. He boasted about denying ice to inmates in hot weather. “A state inspector came in and said: ‘Sheriff Ackal, you need to put ice chests, ice buckets and scoops in the cells,’ ” he told a crowd of supporters, to laughter. “I said: ‘Lady, I don’t know where you come from, but this is not the [Hotel] Monteleone. It’s the Iberia Parish Jail.’ ” At the 2011 Sugar Cane Festival, Ackal sent his officers to the West End to break up the celebration. They blasted sirens to drown out the music and, once again, fired tear gas into the crowd.

White finally gave up and moved his family back to Alexandria. Little Vic and his brother Leonard were unhappy: Each had a girlfriend from Iberia Parish who didn’t want to leave. In 2013, after the birth of his daughter, Arianna, and against his parents’ desperate warnings, Little Vic returned.

White could not believe that his son committed suicide, because every aspect of Little Vic’s life seemed oriented toward the future. Upon returning to New Iberia, he enrolled in a welding program at the local community college, planning to work on offshore rigs. He took a job at a Waffle House, often pulling double shifts. His final conversation with his father took place at 7 a.m. on the last morning of his life. Little Vic had just received a tax rebate and was eager to buy a used Chrysler from a man who fixed up broken-down cars. He had taken cash with him — $1,400 — but after a test drive, he suspected there was a problem with the transmission. White warned him to wait until the seller provided a warranty. “O.K., Dad,” said Little Vic. That was it.

Little Vic’s only previous encounter with the police after returning to New Iberia occurred about five months before, in November, when he was stopped for making an illegal U-turn. He did as his father had told him: He announced that he was the son of the Rev. Victor White and demanded the cops call his father. The officers, unmoved, arrested him. “When Little Vic knows he’s right,” says Vanessa, who speaks of her son in the present tense, “he has a way of getting under your skin.”

The officers who arrested him were named Justin Ortis and Jason Javier. The same men stopped Little Vic near the train tracks that split New Iberia at 11:31 p.m. on the night of March 2, 2014. Minutes earlier, Little Vic and an acquaintance named Isaiah Lewis were buying cigarillos at a nearby Texaco gas station when a fight broke out in the parking lot. Ortis, suspecting that White and Lewis were involved, patted them down. Nothing was found on Lewis, and he was released.

After that, in the police’s version of events, officers found a small quantity of narcotics — marijuana and cocaine — in White’s pocket, and he was detained. Because he asked to speak with narcotics detectives, the officers did not take him to the Iberia Parish Jail, where arrestees are booked, but to the patrol center downtown. When they arrived, according to police statements, White “became uncooperative and refused to exit the deputy’s patrol vehicle.” He wanted them to promise that he would not be sent to jail. When a deputy said he could not make that promise, White said to “tell his people that he loved them.” He said: “I don’t want to go to jail,” and “I’m gone.” Next, the deputies claim in the police report, they heard a gunshot.

The state police also later claimed that Leonard White volunteered to investigators that his brother was carrying a .25-caliber pistol that night that matched the description of the weapon found next to Little Vic’s body in the back seat. (White’s family denies this.)

Victor White, not trusting the police, immediately began his own investigation of the case. He uncovered a number of apparent inconsistencies in the official narrative. Among the most glaring was the assertion that Little Vic had shot himself in the back. Before making the autopsy results public, the parish coroner at the time, Carl Ditch, told White that the bullet entered his son’s chest, White says, contradicting the original news release. Ditch noted that the bullet had entered the side of his chest, beneath the right nipple, and exited under his left armpit. But Little Vic was left-handed. White was incredulous: “You’re trying to tell me that my son, while handcuffed, reached his left hand all the way around the front of his chest and shot himself from the right? I said: ‘No, sir.’ ”

There were inauspicious coincidences. The incident took place in a part of the patrol-center parking lot that had no surveillance cameras. The back-seat camera in the cruiser in which White died was turned off, as was the microphone. When White picked up his son’s possessions, Little Vic’s wallet contained only $91. But White believed that his son was carrying about $1,400. When White told the officer that there had been a mistake, she withdrew the bag and disappeared momentarily into the property room, exclaiming: “Oh! I must have missed these before.” She pulled a pair of $100 bills from the wallet. “I just looked at her,” White says. “I said: ‘Ma’am, do you really think I believe that?’ ”

After the state police cleared the Sheriff’s Department of wrongdoing, Louis Ackal released a statement. “In my opinion,” he said, “this was a tragic loss of life, and it is difficult to understand why it happened.” Ackal extended “his deepest sympathy” to the White family.

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White says that he was not surprised by what he believes happened to his son. “Not at all,” he says. “Because I knew the type of person Louis Ackal was.”

White’s family filed a civil suit against Ackal and Ortis. (In court papers, Ackal and Ortis, who is no longer employed by the sheriff’s office, denied White’s allegations. A lawyer representing the defendants declined to comment.) White shared the results of his investigation with F.B.I. agents, and he said they assured him that they would follow up on his findings. But in December 2015, 21 months after his son’s death, the Justice Department announced that it had not found sufficient evidence “to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any officer fired a weapon at Mr. White.” It declined to prosecute.

When the White family’s attorney, Carol Powell Lexing, pushed for an explanation, the federal officers conceded that they had accepted the state police’s conclusions at face value. Powell Lexing found this “crazy,” because she believed that the state police had incentive to protect Ackal, their colleague for 23 years. Powell Lexing says federal officers “admitted they never saw the gun. They only saw a picture of the gun in the police report. Based on a picture, how could you link it to White?” (At the time this article went to press, the Department of Justice had declined to provide, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed last May, any documents that might explain its decision. Spokespeople for the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice had no comment.)

While the Justice Department investigated the White case, Powell Lexing was frequently contacted by New Iberians eager to tell of abuse suffered at the hands of the Sheriff’s Department. She forwarded these accounts to the F.B.I. White was at least the eighth person to die in custody during Sheriff Ackal’s administration. She didn’t think this was a coincidence.

Three months after declining White’s case, the Justice Department announced it was indicting Louis Ackal on charges of deprivation of rights and conspiracy against rights — in about a dozen incidents unrelated to White’s. Eight of Ackal’s officers had pleaded guilty to civil rights violations and agreed to testify in exchange for reduced sentences. The indictment described a police department that operated like an organized-crime syndicate, with Ackal as kingpin.

According to court papers, Ackal ordered deputies to beat at least five pretrial detainees inside the Iberia Parish Jail. Many of the beatings took place in the prison’s chapel — not because the officers had accepted God into their lives but, the indictment claimed, because the chapel was one of the few places in the prison without surveillance cameras. One inmate was targeted for making what the indictment described as a “lewd comment,” another for sending letters complaining of poor conditions in the jail. An inmate accused of “looking” at a guard was attacked by a police dog, a grisly episode captured on video later leaked to the press. The indictment described an incident in which three drunk off-duty cops beat up a couple of young black men for kicks, a second in which Ackal ordered the assault of a personal rival and a third in which Ackal’s former chief of staff, Lt. Col. Gerald Savoy, known as Bubba, was accused of having ordered the arrest of a man who punched him at a bar. His officers beat the man, shackled him to a bench and ordered him to lick his own blood off the wall.

The judge stripped Ackal of his gun, but he continued to serve as sheriff — even after, according to court papers, he was recorded threatening to shoot a federal attorney prosecuting his case, Mark Blumberg, “right between your [expletive] Jewish-eyes-look-like-opossum bastard.” Last May, after White helped to organize a protest demanding he leave office, Ackal released a one-sentence statement: “It’ll be a cold day in hell when I resign.”

On a hot day last July, White joined a fledgling effort to recall Ackal. He needed to collect the signatures of 16,000 registered voters — about a third of the population of Iberia Parish — by the end of the year to put the measure on a ballot. It was a long shot, and not only because of Louisiana’s high thresholds for political recalls: Though Ackal’s popularity had declined, he had still managed in 2015 to win a runoff election to his third consecutive term as sheriff. White did not care. He drove each weekend to New Iberia and set up a table with voter-registration forms and signature sheets in a West End parking lot. He wore a T-shirt bearing an oversize photograph of his son across his chest.

The parking lot, opposite a red-brick public housing development and framed by abandoned storefronts, belonged to Kevin Broussard, a barbershop owner and school-bus driver who served as the unofficial mayor of his corner of the neighborhood. “So many people are afraid,” Broussard said. “They don’t know their rights.” He had voted for Ackal twice, though he grew suspicious on the night of the sheriff’s first re-election. “It was like a dream. He drove by in a limo, sticking a cigar out the window like Lex Luthor. I said: ‘This dude has too much paper.’ You get to be king, you don’t think no one can stop you.”

Many passing through the lot spoke of regular raids by the narcotics unit, which functioned as a kind of paramilitary force within the sheriff’s office. “They called it ‘Jump-Out Boys Days,’ ” Broussard said. “In other words, jump out on the black boys. They’d say: ‘How much money you made this week? You made enough for me to hit you up?’ That’s how bold they were.” He said narcotics officers barged into homes without warrants, stealing most of the cash they found.

“They’d kick in your door, tear your house up,” said a large man named Whitney Lee. “They would come back here with assault rifles and bulletproof vests in their little Desert Storm outfits like they’re coming to war.” He gave the rueful laugh that tended to accompany discussions of the police in the West End. “I ain’t going to lie, I was scared of them. Because I know they could just as soon kill me.”

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Lee has filed a civil suit against Ackal and two of his deputies, one of 30 or so that have been filed since he took office; at least 10 have been settled, for a cumulative sum of about $1.1 million. Lee’s suit involved an episode that occurred while he was serving time. He was taken to the recreation yard while prison officials searched his cell for contraband, and he was told to lie on the ground and put “your ass in the air for your girlfriend.” Lee, citing his asthma, complained that he couldn’t breathe and was beaten. (In court papers, the defendants’ lawyer denied the charges.)

Broussard waved a laminated paper with a photograph of Victor White III and other men who had died in custody, surrounded by photographs of the indicted officers. He had titled the page “Organized Crime.” Beside the officers’ heads, he had written nicknames for them. Byron Benjamin Lassalle, who pleaded guilty to forcing an inmate to fellate a baton, was Crazy Boy. Ackal was the Don. There was little known publicly about the inner workings of the sheriff’s office, but everyone in New Iberia was connected to everyone else; everyone had secret stories. Since his son’s death, White had received periodic text messages from an anonymous phone number with tips from within the Sheriff’s Department. Oneal Davis, an officer who had recently retired from Ackal’s department, told me the most corrupt, violent cops were the ones Ackal chose for promotion, a system that encouraged ever-increasing levels of brutality, a pyramid scheme of violence.

(In court papers, Ackal has denied that he failed to properly supervise the sheriff’s office. The public-information officer for the sheriff’s office wrote, in emailed statements: “If there is a question of possible wrongdoing by members of our agency, Sheriff Ackal will welcome an independent investigation from an outside law-enforcement agency. Sheriff Ackal does not condone any illegal activities by his employees and will not hesitate to have an employee arrested if it is proved that they are involved in illegal activities.” The officer added that “Sheriff Ackal strives for all of his deputies to be as professional as possible and expects them to treat every citizen within his jurisdiction equally.”)

Also pictured on Broussard’s sheet was Michael Jones, a mentally ill inmate who, according to court papers, died after an outburst in which he ran from his cell naked and screaming. Two former officers, Wesley and Jesse Hayes, along with a former warden, slammed him to the floor, beat him, handcuffed him, put him in a chokehold and sat on top of him until he died. The Hayes brothers had a side career as Da Bayou Boys, a tag-team wrestling duo; after victories, they stuffed their opponents’ mouths with boudin sausage. A judge awarded Jones’s family $61,000 in a wrongful-death suit. In Ackal’s federal case, the Hayes brothers pleaded guilty to other incidents of excessive force; Wesley filed a whistle-blower suit claiming that he was fired for reporting misconduct.

One of the petition organizers working with White, Khadijah Rashad, has for more than 20 years kept in a roller suitcase, locked in a secret compartment of her bedroom closet, an archive of racial violence in the parish. Ackal is the third consecutive sheriff to be taken to court on alleged civil rights violations. Before Hebert’s stunt at the 2006 Sugar Cane Festival, his predecessor, Errol Romero, settled a lawsuit in which he and his jail warden were indicted on charges related to their forcing prisoners to sit in restraint chairs for weeks at a time, and hogtying prisoners with their mouths taped and football helmets placed backward over their heads.

After five hours, White was still leaping through traffic, hailing passers-by, collecting signatures. The recall event had expanded into a more general protest — a protest of parish history, Louisiana history, national history. “You got these ignorant people in positions of power, and they’re abusing it,” Whitney Lee said.

“They call it corruption,” Rashad said. “I call it racism.”

Though neither the Iberia parish president nor the mayor of New Iberia called for Ackal’s removal from office, the Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival replaced his department on the security detail for last year’s festival with officers from Youngsville, a small town 15 miles northwest. Ackal, by then, had bigger problems. He had asked the judge to reconsider the decision to confiscate his gun “in view of what’s happening across the country,” referring to the recent shootings of police officers; two months earlier, Louisiana passed a Blue Lives Matter law, the first in the nation, which gave the police hate-crime protections. The judge was unsympathetic to Ackal’s argument. A week before the festival, federal prosecutors added additional details to the indictment, charging that Ackal had ordered the destruction of the department’s internal-affairs files and routinely instructed his officers to falsify police reports.

As the parades marched downtown, the West End was in a circumspect mood. A few blocks from Kevin Broussard’s parking lot, three women sat in a field next to two homes and a beauty salon that had flooded to a height of four feet during the major Louisiana rain event a month earlier. The homes and the salon belonged to twin sisters named Wonderful and Wonderlynn Galentine. Repairs to the properties were funded by the West End Council of Neighborhoods Association, a nonprofit organization that serves the West End. It formed in 2008, when Ackal took office. “Wecna is here to do those things that government is not doing,” said Eva Lewis, the association’s president, who was checking on the progress to Wonderful’s home. She was joined by Robby Carrier-Bethel, a Wecna member and second-generation activist — her mother, Clara Lee DeGay Carrier, a member of the school board, was the first African-American elected to office in the parish. “There is a huge breakdown in the West End,” Carrier-Bethel said. “Everybody who lives in Iberia Parish has to bear some shame. We have to ask ourselves: How could anyone know anything and turn a blind eye?”

Carrier-Bethel is pursuing a criminal-justice degree; the previous night, she stayed up late to finish a paper about Kantian moral philosophy. “In order to get justice, you need to have truth.” she said. “Children should not have to live in fear of law enforcement. That is the worst thing that could ever happen to a community.” She began to cry. “You have to watch what you say and who you say it to. You have to swallow it. And you know that, as hard as you try, things are not getting better.”

The women hadn’t attended the Sugar Cane Festival for years. “What they’re celebrating is not very respectful to what African-Americans experienced in this parish,” Carrier-Bethel said, measuring her words. As recently as the late 1960s, some sugar-plantation workers were paid in scrip that could be exchanged only at plantation-owned stores. “The history is not the scary part. It’s the ignorance of the history. You hope that things change, but when you go to a parade and you see a sea of whiteness, it reminds you that there’s still a lack of respect for who you are as a person. Until we begin to be brutally honest about what is happening in our parish — what is happening in America — it will always be a sea of whiteness.”

Across town, following the 4-H Live Stock Show and Sale and the Blessing of the Crops, the 75th annual Sugar Cane Festival reached its culmination with the coronation of Queen Sugar. The pageant was held at the festival’s own theater in City Park, which quickly filled to capacity. The men wore oxford shirts in shades of violet, gray and white, with ties and without jackets; the women wore pearls, floral-patterned gowns, bouffant hair. Some had brooches identifying them as “Former Queen Sugar.” The atmosphere was galvanized, giddy. It seemed that everyone knew nearly everyone else. It seemed that every single person was white.

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The curtain opened on the Sugar Lumps, a troupe of middle-aged women dressed in black spandex and emerald sequin vests performing a synchronized dance to Pitbull’s “Celebrate.” On the stage behind them, stands of sugar cane were set against silver draping. In the center stood a throne for King Sucrose and Queen Sugar, who magnanimously waved their scepters.

There followed a procession of visiting queens: Miss Cajun Hot Sauce Queen, Miss Creole Gumbo Queen, Miss Crawfish Queen, Miss Gonzales Jambalaya Queen. After the entrance of the three judges, each a representative of the sugar industry, the contestants for Queen Sugar introduced themselves:

“Where the sugar cane grows in all directions, and our two mills process it in sweet confections, the cane may be much taller than me, but I can promise you that I’m just as sweet. Proudly representing Assumption Parish, I am —”

“We’re going to make your life sooo sweet, when you shake it on down to sugar town. Feel free to stomp your feet to that good old Cajun beat. Proudly representing Terrebonne Parish, I am —”

The daughters of the old planter families held elaborate curtsies while announcers read their biographical statements. When asked whom they would most like to meet, three contestants chose Jean Étienne de Boré, who made sugar cane commercially viable in Louisiana in 1795.

At last the M.C. requested the envelope. The contestants smiled bravely. The audience quivered in anticipation. The winner was announced: Caroline Marcello of Lafourche Parish. She was handed a bouquet of roses, a silver tiara with bejeweled sugar-cane stalks, a cape embroidered with glittering white petals. The audience stood as one. In the back row, an ecstatic woman tried to get the attention of an elderly man beside her. He was confused; he had not heard the result.

“She won!” the woman shouted, putting her arms around the man’s neck. “She won! We won!”

In late October, five days before the trial was set to begin, Bubba Savoy pleaded guilty to striking an inmate in the testicles with his baton, leaving only Ackal to stand trial. During his officers’ testimony, Ackal sat passively, spitting tobacco into a foam cup. Narcotics officers testified that Ackal encouraged them to terrorize the West End, lie in depositions to cover up excessive use of force and beat whomever they liked. “He wanted to take the streets back from the [expletive],” said the former narcotics officer Marion Borel. “They were animals,” explained a former deputy, Jason Comeaux, “and they needed to be treated like animals.” He recalled an interrogation in which a supervising officer pointed at a discoloration on the floor and told the suspect: “You see that stain there? That’s from the last [expletive] I shot.” When asked how it felt, beating up black people, a former officer named Jacob Huckaby called it “liberating, I guess, to have a little extra power on somebody.” One federal prosecutor estimated that hundreds of victims had been beaten on Ackal’s watch.

The deputies testified for four days. On the fifth day, Ackal’s lawyer, John McLindon, argued that the narcotics unit was a rogue division within the department, operating without Ackal’s knowledge. He said that no one ever claimed that Ackal himself beat an inmate.

After four hours of deliberation, the jury found Ackal not guilty on all counts. “God bless it,” Ackal said, after court was adjourned. “Our judicial system worked today.”

Carol Powell Lexing was poleaxed. “You’ve got the most corrupt Sheriff’s Department in the state of Louisiana, probably in the country, and you have the deputies testify about all the corruption — and he still gets off. It’s totally incredible.” She denied that she was discouraged about her own case, which is scheduled for trial in August. “I feel encouraged, more than ever. Because now you have the deputies’ testimony about the culture of corruption and violence in the department.”

White was stunned. “I don’t understand how the jury could have acquitted,” he said. “It was like they weren’t paying attention.”

The effort to recall Ackal failed to secure enough signatures by the deadline. As White awaits the civil trial, he continues to organize protests against Ackal through an organization he has formed to fight police brutality. It’s called Justice for Victor White. I asked whether he thought justice for his son was possible. “True justice,” he said, “would be to bring my son’s life back.”

Ackal, meanwhile, was triumphant. He spoke of cleaning house, of greater transparency. He emphasized the need for better relations between the police and the West End. “We’re losing our black children,” he told a reporter.

Then he returned to the sheriff’s office, where he was given back his gun.

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