Never forget that 2020 was the year that Black, Indigenous and otherwise racialized journalists in Canada stopped whispering and said it all out loud. In the order that I remember:

#Assange Extradition Decision

Joined the videolink to London’s Old Bailey.

There are 12 of us on this link so far, but journalists can join for another half an hour.

Well cross to the court room shortly before 10 London time.

ABC News Europe correspondent @lb_online also on the link

Carrie-Ann Greenbank from Channel 9 also

38 of us now plus Jen Robinson.

We’re in court . Nothing to see yet

Some thoughts from yesterday. A thread:

I have spent 23 years at The @nytimes, seven of them covering Congress. I made my home at a desk in the press gallery off the Senate chamber. I felt privileged to do so. I consider the Capitol sacred space. 1/

I have been there for any number of historic moments. The funeral of Ronald Reagan, a few years after 9/11, when the building had to be cleared in a panic because the governor of Kentucky flew his plane too close to the Capitol and the police thought it was a terrorist attack. 2/

The confirmation of Supreme Court justices, including John Roberts, the chief. The swearing in of Nancy Pelosi as the first female Speaker of the House. Twice. The impeachment of President Trump. I still have my own handwritten tally of the vote to acquit. I bore witness. 3/

I know that building inside and out. I know (or once knew) where the bathtubs in the basement are. They were put there in to the 1800s because senators didn’t have tubs in their own homes. The Senate historian once gave me a tour. 4/

I know where they keep the Lincoln catafalque – the funeral bier, or platform, that has held the casket of every person who has lain in state since Lincoln. It's housed behind a locked gate in a little alcove underneath the crypt, the circular room underneath the Rotunda. 5/

@StefSimanowitz wrote about Eric in 2013. Here Eric speaks about standing up for journalist

Stefan Simanowitz on Twitter on 19.3.13...thread
In 2003, as Baghdad shuddered under the onslaught that was operation "shock and awe", 75yrold Eric Levy from Camden was huddled with a dozen other peace campaigners in an air raid shelter at Dura oil refinery in southern Baghdad./

The group found themselves in Iraq at the time of the Allied invasion after travelling there from London by double-decker bus. They called themselves the "human shields" and set off with the intention of protecting Iraqi civilians from Allied bombs.

If you're over 20, or were a precociously politically aware five-year-old in 2003, you might remember the human shields leaving for Iraq in a frenzy of media coverage. “The idea behind the movement was to use the racist way in which Western lives are valued /

more than Iraqi lives to either stop the invasion or – failing that – protect crucial civilian infrastructure sites,” Levy recalls ten years on. “We may not have achieved the first objective, but none of the sites where the shields were staying were bombed.”/