Cheryl Miskell retweeted
⛔️Italian prosecutors in Rome have opened an official criminal investigation into wanted war criminals Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Defence Minister Israel Katz, and 13 other senior military, police, and prison officials over the torture of "Freedom Flotilla" activists‼️
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
Tonight in Hebron and throughout the West Bank, residents—including women and children—were evacuated from their homes.
This is not what a war to eradicate terror looks like.
This is what terror looks like.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
BBC BROKE EQUALITY LAW AND GOT CAUGHT
Carrie Gracie spent 30 years at the @BBC. She spoke fluent Mandarin. She ran the Beijing bureau. She was one of four international editors, two men and two women.
Then in 2017 the BBC was forced to publish salary data. Gracie looked at what her male equivalent, the North America editor, was earning. He was on nearly double her salary. She had explicitly said equal pay was a condition of taking the China role. The BBC agreed. Then quietly paid her far less anyway.
She asked for equal pay. The BBC offered her a raise that still left her below the men. She turned it down. She resigned from the China post in January 2018 and published an open letter telling the licence fee public exactly what their broadcaster was doing.
The BBC then put her through nearly a year of an internal grievance process that went nowhere. It took three meetings with the Director-General and the threat of an employment tribunal before she got a public apology and the backdated pay owed to her. The total came to £361,000.
She donated every penny to the Fawcett Society (@fawcettsociety), the gender equality charity. She said the fight was about principle, not the payout.
A publicly funded institution, legally obligated to follow equality law, paid women less than men in identical roles, got caught, dragged it out for a year, and only coughed up under threat of a tribunal. That is not a pay oversight. That is a policy.
Gracie did not ask for a favour. She asked for what she was owed. The BBC made her fight for it like it was a privilege.
Sources: @BBCNews, @guardian, @thetimes, @Independent.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
He was driving home from his grandfather's funeral when the police pulled the car over and brought out a drug dog.
They searched the family in the rain on the side of the road.
Robert Wilkins happened to be a Harvard-trained lawyer.
He is now a federal appeals judge.
Interstate 68, Maryland, May 1992. Wilkins was 28 and a public defender in Washington. He was in a rented car with his aunt, his uncle and his cousin, driving back from a funeral in Chicago.
A Maryland State Police trooper stopped them for speeding. Then the trooper asked to search the car.
Wilkins, who did this for a living, said no and asked why. He was told that if he refused, they would wait for a drug dog.
They waited. The dog came. The family stood on the shoulder in the rain while a dog went round the car.
They found nothing, because there was nothing.
And then Wilkins did what almost nobody is equipped to do. He sued.
In discovery, his lawyers obtained a Maryland State Police intelligence document that described the profile of drug couriers on that corridor in explicitly racial terms. It was in writing. It was a state document.
The case settled in 1995. The terms included something unusual and important: Maryland agreed to record the race of every driver stopped and searched on its highways, and to hand the data over.
That data became the statistical foundation of what the whole country now calls racial profiling. The phrase "driving while Black" entered American English through cases like this one.
Barack Obama appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2014.
The man they made stand in the rain beside a rented car now sits on one of the most powerful courts in America.
His story is one of many that deserve to be remembered.
Get our book and uncover the histories too often left out of the record savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
Proposal: AI services are only allowed to generate video and audio content featuring characters who look and sound like robots from a 1970s TV show. They must look metallic and speak in easily identifiable nasally monotones. AI companies are strictly forbidden from providing any service which simulates real people in video or audio media, and if they can't figure out a way to prevent users from generating those materials then their AI models are not allowed on the market. Full ban on any AI replication of audio or moving imagery depicting humans.
I'm serious. We need regulations requiring AI-generated video and audio to be clearly labeled in order to avoid sliding into an information ecosystem where nobody knows what's true anymore, and our universally recognized pop culture depictions of robots would be a perfect way to make it clear to people that they are viewing AI-generated content. Otherwise we're just going to be seeing more and more disinformation, misinformation, fake clickbait YouTube videos, election fraud, scams and AI psychosis until everyone's sense-making faculties are shot to shit.
Have you heard Jack Dorsey's speech-trained AI model Dessa? It's completely indistinguishable from human speech. You hear recordings of human conversations with those chatbots and you can't tell which one is the human and which one is the AI.
Ban that shit. Their similarity to human speech is going to dramatically exacerbate the effects of AI psychosis as more and more people convince themselves they're talking to a real person, and scammers are going to have a field day conning the elderly out of their life savings using simulated human conversations. Make it extremely illegal to create or use any such technology, permitting chatbots to speak only in a flat robot voice.
You can still have AI videos, AI movies, AI audiobooks, and voice conversations with chatbots, they just need to look and sound like something that cannot be mistaken for a real human. If you want your video and audio to look real, you've got to hire real humans to make them. I think that's an entirely moderate and reasonable compromise.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
Not the USSR - Nazi Germany.
Fascist Capitalism to the BONE!
The Plutocratic Kleptocracy of America.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
Breaking: Lula has come from behind to win Brazil’s runoff election defeating Trump-Netanyahu ally Bolsonaro. Moments after the victory Sao Paulo erupted in celebration.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
Today, NFL star Azeez Al-Shaair has announced that he will honor 8-year-old Fatima Al-Bayook, who lost her entire family in an Israeli airstrike in 2023 and survived two days beneath the rubble, only to be shot and murdered by Israeli forces in Gaza two days ago.
He will be wearing her name on his eye black during the Texans game against the Giants.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
If these Flock/Axon cameras weren't INTENDED to be abused, they wouldn't have been DESIGNED to be abused.
2 New Bedford, Massachusetts police officers fired for allegedly misusing Flock cameras - CBS Boston share.google/s9kb5BYzGJmfoBT…
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
An elected official looking at a maternity ward and seeing '300 terror*sts being born.' When newborn babies taking their first breaths are stripped of their innocence before they even open their eyes, we are witnessing a terrifying level of dehumanization.
infants& babies.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
If they do not respect our lives and the lives of those we love, how are we obligated to continue respecting theirs?
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
A 9-year-old boy was grabbed by a stranger, forced into a car, and driven away while selling water on the side of the road.
But as the car sped through the streets, the terrified little boy looked out the window and began waving desperately for help. What happened next was unbelievable.
It happened in Jacksonville, Florida. The boy had been selling bottled water near an intersection when a man suddenly forced him into a vehicle and took off.
Shameika Dowell, who knew the boy and was helping supervise the children, witnessed what happened. She jumped into her own vehicle with her son and took off after the suspect, refusing to let the little boy disappear.
As she followed the car through the streets, she could see the boy inside, frightened and crying for help. She kept chasing until the driver finally stopped, then moved to block his escape.
But the boy was still trapped inside. Shameika rushed toward the vehicle and began kicking at the passenger door, determined to get it open. Other bystanders rushed over to see what was happening and began helping. They kept going until she finally managed to force the door open and pull the little boy to safety.
Police arrested the suspected kidnapper, and the boy was reunited with his family. Despite everything he’d been through, he later said he still wanted to sell water so he could buy clothes for school.
Shameika Dowell refused to look away when a little boy needed help. Her courage deserves to be recognized. 💙 – at Chicago, IL
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
She went to the election office to find out whether she could run for mayor.
A probation officer checked, signed a form, and told Pamela Moses she was eligible.
He was wrong. She got SIX YEARS for his mistake.
Memphis, Tennessee, 2019. Pamela Moses is a Black Lives Matter activist who had been in repeated conflict with local officials. She wanted to run for mayor.
To do it she needed her voting rights restored. She went to the probation office. An officer checked her file, completed and signed the certificate saying her probation was complete, and she took that signed document to the election commission.
The document was wrong. Her probation had not expired. The officer had made an error.
She was prosecuted for illegally registering to vote and, in January 2022, sentenced to six years and one day.
She was sent to prison on the strength of a mistake made by a state employee, on a state form, which she had asked that employee to check.
The sentence drew national attention. Then a reporter obtained internal correspondence showing the Tennessee Department of Correction had conducted its own review and concluded the officer had erred.
In February 2022 a judge granted her a new trial, finding the state had withheld that document. Shortly afterwards, the district attorney dropped the case entirely.
She spent eighty-two days in prison.
The officer who filled in the form faced no charges.
Now put this next to the post at seven this morning. Crystal Mason in Texas. Pamela Moses in Tennessee. Two Black women, two states, two prosecutions, nine years between them in sentences handed down — for ballots that were never counted and registrations that never took effect.
Ask yourself how many hours of prison time have been handed to the people who actually administered those forms.
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
كذّبت نتنياهو وفضحت همجية المستوطنين.. مصورة "واشنطن بوست" الأمريكية هايدي ليفين: "نتنياهو زعم أنني كنت أتلقى المساعدة، بينما الحقيقة أن المستوطنين أوقفوني فقط لسرقة قلادتي، وشبان فلسطينيون هم من حَمَوني بأجسادهم وشكلوا درعاً لمنعهم من الفتك بنا مجدداً".
Cheryl Miskell retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: A Black couple showed up to tour an apartment in Queens... and the broker accidentally texted THEM instead of the owner: "Ugh. They are Black."
They'd just moved from Delaware for her new job. Now they're SUING Douglas Elliman, the agent AND the owners.
"It doesn't change the pain. It doesn't take away the pain you caused us that day."
Think about it. They were judged before they even had a chance.
They only found out because she texted the wrong person. Most people never do.