The Truth About COVID19

Countering misinformation about COVID-19

A joint campaign with the Government of the United Kingdom and BBC World

WHO has joined forces with the communications teams at the Government of the United Kingdom and the Prime Minister’s office for an awareness campaign about the risks of incorrect and false information regarding the pandemic. “Stop The Spread” is a global campaign, rolled out on BBC World television, website and apps during May and June 2020.

The campaign aims to raise awareness among BBC audiences of the risks of misinformation on COVID-19. It encourages them to double check information from unreliable sources and promotes WHO and national health authorities as trusted sources of information. 

In addition to the global TV and web channels, the campaign will also roll out through BBC digital apps in these 20 countries worldwide.

• Africa - Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Zambia
• Asia – Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Thailand
• Europe – Azerbaijan, Moldova
• Middle East – Algeria, Libya, Tunisia
• Latin America – Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Paraguay

Read the full article here



Source: World Health Organization

Is Vagina Probing Sexual Assault???

In light of recent police brutality cases and suspicious deaths of Black [female] Americans while in police custody, is vagina probing sexual assault??? 21 year old Charnesia Corley says, "I felt like they sexually assaulted me." Please read about her case in Texas.

-Kesha Johnson-Clark, Founder of SisterHood Inc/Green Afro Honey
San Francisco, California



A woman has accused sheriff’s deputies in Texas of sexually assaulting her at a gas station by stripping her and conducting a body cavity search without her consent during a traffic stop.
Charnesia Corley, 21, who is African American, said officers with the Harris County sheriff’s department held her down in a Texaco parking lot and probed her vagina in a search for marijuana.

“They did a manual cavity search. It’s the most serious search you can do under our constitution and should be done in a sterile environment. You sure can’t do it in public by the side of the road. It’s unbelievable,” her attorney, Sam Cammack, told the Guardian on Tuesday.

Corley, who has no criminal record, will file a complaint to the Internal Affairs Division, her attorney said. “I’m doing it right now,” Cammack said, adding that he hoped there was video of the incident.

 

Corley was pulled over at around 10.30pm on 21 June near Ella Boulevard and Barren Springs Drive in Houston while driving to a store in order, she said, to fetch something for her sick mother.

According to the Harris County sheriff’s office, a deputy pulled her over for running a stop sign. Upon smelling what he believed to be marijuana he handcuffed Corley, placed her in the back of his patrol car and searched her vehicle in vain for the drug.

Upon returning to the patrol car he then allegedly smelled marijuana, concluded Corley had it hidden on her person, and summoned female deputies. One was African American, the other white.

One ordered her on the ground and ordered her to pull her trousers down, Corley told ABC13. “I told her, I said: ‘Well ma’am, I don’t have any underwear on.’ She says: ‘Well that doesn’t matter. Pull your pants down.’”

Corley said she was ordered to open her legs but said she did not wish to do so. “So she says: ‘Well if you don’t open them, I’m going to break them,’” Corley said. “All I could do was just lay there. I felt helpless.”

She told KTRK she felt violated. “I feel like they sexually assaulted me. I really do. I feel disgusted, downgraded, humiliated.”

Corley was charged with resisting arrest and possession of marijuana after deputies allegedly found .02 ounces of marijuana.

The Harris County sheriff’s department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. But a spokesperson told local media the deputies did everything as they should and that Corley had assented to a strip search.

Cammack disputed that and said an officer’s report of the incident, which he had obtained, corroborated his client’s version. The attorney declined to say where the marijuana was found but said police claimed to have found it on Corley’s person. Police usually chose not to prosecute for such tiny amounts of marijuana, he added.

Regardless of what was found, the search violated privacy and the constitution, said Cammack. “They could’ve found a kilo of cocaine insider of her and still should not have done it.”

Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director of the ACLU of Texas, said a cavity search without a warrant was a “blatant” violation of the fourth amendment, and that an orifice probe was the most invasive search possible.

“A body cavity search without a warrant would be constitutionally suspect. But a body cavity search by the side of the road ... I can’t imagine a circumstance where that would be constitutional,” she told the Houston Chronicle.

She noted previous controversies over cavity searches in Texas. In 2013, the Department of Public Safety was forced to pay $185,000 to two women who alleged troopers had conducted cavity searches by the roadside, illuminated by patrol car headlights, in full view of passing traffic.

Police in Texas came under renewed scrutiny last month over the case of Sandra Bland, an African American woman found dead in her Waller County jail cell after being detained during a traffic stop.


Source: The Guardian

Psst...Planned Parenthood Is Not Selling Baby Parts!!!

http://youtu.be/DUT1u8ePmVY

It’s weird for those of us with two brain cells to rub together, that this is even a thing. Because first of all, obviously Planned Parenthood doesn’t sell BABY PARTS. Jesus fucking christ, get a hold of yourselves. Baby parts!

3% of all Planned Parenthood’s activities are abortions, and more than 90% of those are in the first trimester when it’s about size of a kidney bean, so they do see some pieces of fetal tissue. Which are just going to be thrown away in the garbage, but which the patient can instead choose to donate to important medical research.

HOW DARE THEY! How dare Planned Parenthood allow women to aid in the research and treatment of conditions like H.I.V. and Parkinson’s disease, when instead those women could just be throwing that tissue in the garbage!

So yeah, there’s the fact that Planned Parenthood obviously isn’t “selling baby parts.” And then there’s the fact that the group releasing this video are some of the same people who worked for the group Live Action, which is best known for…editing together misleading videos attacking Planned Parenthood.

So despite the fact that this is an obviously made up and ridiculous accusation, actual politicians are taking it seriously. If you live in the US, your tax dollars are now going toward Congressional Republicans calling for a formal investigation, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has announced they’ll launch a probe. A probe for baby parts! Good luck, guys!

This all reminds me of a course I took in college on heresy. I remember learning about how multiple times throughout human history, various groups of people have been accused of the very specific act of gathering together and hosting orgies, and then taking the resulting babies from any past orgies and burning them into ashes, which are then formed into cakes, which are then eaten. Usually it’s supposed to be the Jews doing this but plenty of other marginalized groups have been accused as well. And it always baffled me to think that people could really, truly believe that their fellow humans were doing something so obviously stupid and made up.

Well, now it’s 2015 and an organization that is mostly responsible for making sure poor women have access to basic medical care including cancer screenings, checkups, and birth control, are accused of convincing women to abort their babies and then tearing them into parts and selling them on the black market.

And I realize, that if it helps you achieve your goals — whether they be persecuting people of a different faith or cutting funding for poor women’s health care — it becomes surprisingly easy to believe something unbelievable.


Source: Skepchick

UPDATE: California SB967

And we have great news...California legislature passes YES Means YES Sexual Consent Bill!!!

The Senate unanimously passed SB967 as states and universities across the U.S. are below pressure to alter how they manage rape allegations. The bill now goes to Gov. Jerry Brown, who has not indicated his stance on the bill. Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, stated his bill would start a paradigm shift in how California campuses avoid and investigate sexual assault. Rather than utilizing the refrain no signifies no,the definition of consent below the bill needs affirmative, unambiguous and conscious choice by each celebration to engage in sexual activity.

Advocates for victims of sexual assault supported the alter as a single that will supply consistency across campuses and challenge the notion that victims have to have resisted assault in order to have valid complaints. Some critics say the legislation is overreaching and sends universities into murky, unfamiliar legal waters. The bill would apply to all California post-secondary schools, public and private, that obtain state money for student economic aid. The California State University and University of California systems are backing the legislation after adopting comparable consent standards this year.

The bill also requires colleges and universities to adopt victim-centered sexual-assault response policies and implement complete applications to avoid assault. The bill passed the state Assembly on Monday by a 52-16 vote. The 23-campus Cal State University endorsed the legislation in an Aug. 25 letter to de Leon.
Read the full article here...



Source: Daily News

Wendy Davis Wants to End Statute of Limitations on Sexual Assault & Rape

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis proposed ending the state’s statute of limitations on sexual assault at a press conference on Wednesday, during which she criticized opponent Greg Abbott for failing to advocate for rape victims. Davis presented the proposal as an expansion of her past legislative efforts on behalf of sexual assault survivors, following up on a recent statewide attack ad on Abbott accusing him of “siding with a corporation over a rape victim.”

"To turn around and make survivors pay the price for our failure ... is almost criminal in itself" says Davis.

Read the full article here...

New Birth Control Rules for Non-Profits

The new accommodation will allow religious nonprofits, such as Catholic schools and hospitals, to opt out of covering birth control by notifying the Department of Health and Human Services of their objections. HHS and the Department of Labor will then arrange for a third-party insurer to pay for and administer the coverage for the nonprofits' employees so that women still receive the contraceptive coverage guaranteed to them by the Affordable Care Act.

“Women across the country deserve access to recommended preventive services that are important to their health, no matter where they work,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell. “Today’s announcement reinforces our commitment to providing women with access to coverage for contraception, while respecting religious considerations raised by non-profit organizations and closely held for-profit companies."

The original accommodation required religious nonprofits to directly ask a third-party insurer to pay for and administer the contraception coverage if the nonprofit objected to covering it. But several nonprofits sued the administration over the rule, claiming that the act of filling out a form violated their religious beliefs by serving as a "permission slip" for its employees to use contraceptives.

The administration developed the new accommodation to pre-empt those lawsuits, which legal experts expected the Supreme Court to take up next year. The court already ruled in June against the administration's contraception coverage rule, which requires most employers to cover the full range of 20 contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration at no out-of-pocket cost to women. The court decided that closely-held for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby, a craft-supply store owned by a family of Christians, should be able to opt out of covering birth control for religious reasons.

Read the full article here...

Alert: Justice for Jada

Watch 16 year old Jada speak about her rape and how she was mocked on Twitter once photos of her were viciously posted online with the hashtag #JADAPOSE...

The Houston teen, identified only as Jada, said she went to a party with friends where the host gave her a drink she now believes was spiked with a drug. She passed out, and doesn’t remember anything from when she was unconscious. It wasn’t until Jada saw disturbing pictures and tweets on social media, that she believed she’d been raped. “Everybody knows,” Jada told KHOU 11. “And everybody’s texting me are you OK? You’re going to be OK, and I was like alright.” (TIME doesn’t usually identify rape victims, but we are making an exception in this instance because Jada wanted to come forward.)

It’s not immediately clear who originally tweeted the photos, because the photos have been mostly removed and some Twitter handles of people close to the incident have been de-activated. But the pictures soon went viral under the hashtag #jadapose, allegedly referring to the position of her body in the photographs. The alleged rapist was reportedly denouncing Jada and her story before his Twitter account was deactivated, including one tweet that said “HOW ITS RAPE? YOU HAD 2 MONTHS TO SAY SOMETHING BUT YOU AINT SAY [SH*T] TILL YOU GET EXPOSED?”

The circumstances of Jada’s decision to come forward are truly horrific and no teenager should have to endure the double violation of a rape and then a social media maelstrom at her expense, and no victim should feel she has to identify herself in order to stop abuse. But maybe there’s a silver lining in this strategy for survivors. By coming forward, Jada traded her anonymity for a face and a voice, and with identity comes a certain kind of power.

Source: TIME Magazine