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eyes on the U.S.

Cleveland Kidnapper Ariel Castro To Appear In Court Today

AP, CNN, REUTERS, WASHINGTON POST (USA)

Worldcrunch

CLEVELAND - Ariel Castro, 52, the man charged with keeping three women captive for almost a decade will appear in court for the first time on Thursday.

Castro is accused of kidnapping Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23, and Michelle Knight, 32, between 2002 and 2004. At the time, they were 14, 16 and 20 years old.

They were held captive until one of them escaped on Monday.

On Wednesday Castro was charged with four counts of kidnapping – covering the three women and a daughter born to Berry in captivity – as well as three counts of rape.

Reuters reports that he owns the house where the women were oppressively kept in dungeon-like squalid conditions, where they were raped, starved, beaten, and kept in chains.

The police had detained two of Castro’s brothers on Monday but they were later released, as they appeared to have no involvement with this crime, according to the AP.

The Washington Post notes that they both have outstanding warrants for separate misdemeanor cases and will also face a judge Thursday on those matters.

Castro, a school bus driver who lost his job last fall, had been thought to live alone in the house by neighbors. CNN writes that they describe him as “a very outgoing person, a nice man,” but in hindsight “he had been fooling us.”

The alarm was raised on Monday when Amanda Berry managed to get the attention of a neighbor and escape when Castro briefly left the premises.

 

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Society

Influencer Union? The Next Labor Rights Battle May Be For Social Media Creators

With the end of the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, the creator economy is the next frontier for organized labor.

​photograph of a smartphone on a selfie stick

Smartphone on a selfie stick

Steve Gale/Unsplash
David Craig and Stuart Cunningham

Hollywood writers and actors recently proved that they could go toe-to-toe with powerful media conglomerates. After going on strike in the summer of 2023, they secured better pay, more transparency from streaming services and safeguards from having their work exploited or replaced by artificial intelligence.

But the future of entertainment extends well beyond Hollywood. Social media creators – otherwise known as influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, vloggers and live streamers – entertain and inform a vast portion of the planet.

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For the past decade, we’ve mapped the contours and dimensions of the global social media entertainment industry. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, these creators struggle to be seen as entertainers worthy of basic labor protections.

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