Hundreds of people have taken part in a demonstration in central Berlin to protest against giving additional weapons to Ukraine, urging the German authorities to deescalate the disaster by paving the way for negotiations with Vladimir Putin rather.
Police estimated there were being 13,000 individuals at the Uprising for Peace, at the Brandenburg Gate, organised by Sahra Wagenknecht, a renegade member of the Hyperlinks get together, and veteran feminist campaigner Alice Schwarzer.
The organisers claimed as numerous as 50,000 took part. Similar demonstrations took area in other German cities.
In a speech at the protest, Wagenknecht spoke of “the get started of a citizens’ initiative” and a “starting signal for a new, solid peace motion in Germany”. She stated the demonstrators had been united by the truth they did not come to feel represented by the governing administration of Olaf Scholz and his overseas minister Annalena Baerbock more than their decision to supply Ukraine with weapons.
Protesters throughout Europe demonstrate towards war in Ukraine – video report
Protesters carried banners studying: ‘Helmets these days, tanks tomorrow, the working day just after tomorrow your sons,” in reference to the manner in which the coalition governing administration has amplified its navy guidance for Kyiv, in the beginning donating 5,000 helmets and far more a short while ago agreeing to send German-designed Leopard II tanks.
Other banners read: “Diplomaten statt Grenaten (Diplomats in its place of grenades)”, “Stop the Killing” and “Not My War, Not My Government”.
“We are like the slaves to war and the warmongers,” reported Norbert, a former soldier, declining to give his surname, who held a banner looking through “The real enemy sits in the City of London and New York,” a reference he claimed to the economical powers who he claimed ended up at the rear of the war and had no interest in it ending. Germany, he mentioned, experienced no correct to participate in a further war, just after the next planet war.
The Rebellion for Peace was organised by remaining-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht (centre) and women’s legal rights activist Alice Schwarzer (suitable). Photograph: Anadolu Company/Getty Visuals
Just one male held a banner on which he mentioned people experienced been numbed into accepting the war by the sedative consequences of the coronavirus vaccine. All around the demonstration, loudspeakers blasted peace tunes these types of as John Lennon’s Think about and Nena’s 99 Crimson Balloons.
A woman identified as Edith, carrying a massive portrait of the Indian groundbreaking Mahatma Gandhi, mentioned: “We should really observe his case in point of nonviolent resistance to bring an end to this madness.”
In other places, other close by demonstrations showed sympathy for Ukraine, with banners examining: “Stop Putin’s War” and “Help Ukraine Defend Itself”.
Hundreds of individuals collect in the course of a demonstration at Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gate, calling for peace negotiations with Russia in the Ukraine war. Photograph: Anadolu Company/Getty Images
A poster held by a group of anti-fascist demonstrators pointed out how Wagenknecht experienced put warnings of a Russian invasion of Ukraine down to media propaganda, stating in a Television set broadcast on 20 February, 2022: “We can be pleased that Putin is not like he is presented as staying, specifically a mad Russian nationalist who is intoxicated with the notion of shifting borders. If that was the situation, then negotiations would probably be pointless.”
A team of Ukrainians wrapped in their country’s flag exterior the close by Russian embassy held up posters and slogans including, “Not providing weapons to Ukraine is the equivalent to genocide support”.
Roman Overko, from the Ukrainian city of Lviv who now lives in Berlin, mentioned: “The concept of negotiating is naive. How do you negotiate with this kind of enemies of humanity? You just cannot talk to them like standard people. Putin is a 2nd Hitler.”
Many men and women getting element in the protest carried placards saying tanks must not be equipped to Ukraine. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Yevhen Titarenko, a Ukrainian film director in Berlin to existing his documentary Japanese Front, shot on the frontline with a volunteer medics battalion, stated prior to the demonstration: “The demonstrators say they are pacifists. Very well, I’m a pacifist way too. But imagine someone’s seeking to blow your doorways down, if you don’t shoot again, they’ll just kill you, acquire all you have, rape your wife, get rid of your little ones. To make an agreement with a clinically mad old guy will make no perception.”
Baerbock was singled out at the demonstration as the federal government member with the most obligation for drawing Germany further into the conflict. Members angrily shouted “Baerbock raus” – or Baerbock out – for the duration of and at the finish of Wagenknecht’s tackle. Scholz and the pro-business enterprise FDP’s Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, head of the Bundestag defence committee, who has pressured the govt to supply a lot more armed forces assistance, ended up also criticised.
Wagenknecht stated her major drive was to deliver to an end the “terrible suffering and dying in Ukraine”. But that meant presenting Russia negotiations, she explained, “instead of a in no way-ending war of attrition with at any time newer weapons”. She said her childhood fears of a nuclear war in the 1980s had been revived by the latest conflict. The chance of the enlargement of the war across Europe and perhaps the planet was “very big”.
Roses on a destroyed Russian tank variety T-72 up coming to the Russian embassy in Berlin, Germany. Photograph: Steffi Loos/Getty Pictures
Two weeks back Wagenknecht and Schwarzer experienced revealed a “Manifest for Peace” in which they urged Chancellor Scholz to “stop the escalation in weapons deliveries”. It has so far been signed by about 650,000 individuals, together with prominent intellectuals and political figures.
They had been criticised in current times right after suggesting that “anyone whose coronary heart beat for peace” would be welcome to the demonstration, soon after far-ideal groups expressed their desire to attend.
On Twitter, the significantly-right populist AfD celebration posted a photo of Jörg City, its chairman for Saxony, at the Brandenburg Gate, next to the symbol of a dove of peace, stating: “A 12 months soon after the start off of the war we eventually want really serious initiatives toward peace negotiations as a substitute of additional escalation!” It included it was “alarming” that these who named for peace were being becoming discredited as traitors.
Jürgen Elsässer, editor-in-main of Compact, a journal right symbolizing the AfD, was also current. Law enforcement intervened at the start out of the demonstration to break up a scuffle as anti-fascist demonstrators tried using to exclude him and his entourage.
The management of Wagenknecht’s individual bash, Die Linke, distanced on their own from the celebration.
The Social Democrats’ Katja Mast accused the organisers of “serving Russian propaganda”.
Christian Lindner, the finance minister, condemned the rally, declaring: “Those who really do not stand at Ukraine’s aspect are standing on the false aspect of history”.
NEW YORK — The fear started when a few patients saw their nurses and dietitians posting job searches on LinkedIn.
Word spread to Facebook groups, and patients started calling Coram CVS, a major U.S. supplier of the compounded IV nutrients on which they rely for survival. To their dismay, CVS Health confirmed the rumors on June 1: It was closing 36 of the 71 branches of its Coram home infusion business and laying off about 2,000 nurses, dietitians, pharmacists, and other employees.
Many of the patients left in the lurch have life-threatening digestive disorders that render them unable to eat or drink. They depend on parenteral nutrition, or PN — in which amino acids, sugars, fats, vitamins, and electrolytes are pumped, in most cases, through a specialized catheter directly into a large vein near the heart.
The day after CVS’ move, another big supplier, Optum Rx, announced its own consolidation. Suddenly, thousands would be without their highly complex, shortage-plagued, essential drugs and nutrients.
“With this kind of disruption, patients can’t get through on the phones. They panic,” said Cynthia Reddick, a senior nutritionist who was let go in the CVS restructuring.
“It was very difficult. Many emails, many phone calls, acting as a liaison between my doctor and the company,” said Elizabeth Fisher Smith, a 32-year-old public health instructor in New York City, whose Coram branch closed. A rare medical disorder has forced her to rely on PN for survival since 2017. “In the end, I got my supplies, but it added to my mental burden. And I’m someone who has worked in health care nearly my entire adult life.”
CVS had abandoned most of its less lucrative market in home parenteral nutrition, or HPN, and “acute care” drugs like IV antibiotics. Instead, it would focus on high-dollar, specialty intravenous medications like Remicade, which is used for arthritis and other autoimmune conditions.
Home and outpatient infusions are a growing business in the United States, as new drugs for chronic illness enable patients, health care providers, and insurers to bypass in-person treatment. Even the wellness industry is cashing in, with spa storefronts and home hydration services.
But while reimbursement for expensive new drugs has drawn the interest of big corporations and private equity, the industry is strained by a lack of nurses and pharmacists. And the less profitable parts of the business — as well as the vulnerable patients they serve — are at serious risk.
This includes the 30,000-plus Americans who rely for survival on parenteral nutrition, which has 72 ingredients. Among those patients are premature infants and post-surgery patients with digestive problems, and people with short or damaged bowels, often the result of genetic defects.
While some specialty infusion drugs are billed through pharmacy benefit managers that typically pay suppliers in a few weeks, medical plans that cover HPN, IV antibiotics, and some other infusion drugs can take 90 days to pay, said Dan Manchise, president of Mann Medical Consultants, a home care consulting company.
In the 2010s, CVS bought Coram, and Optum bought up smaller home infusion companies, both with the hope that consolidation and scale would offer more negotiating power with insurers and manufacturers, leading to a more stable market. But the level of patient care required was too high for them to make money, industry officials said.
“With the margins seen in the industry,” Manchise said, “if you’ve taken on expensive patients and you don’t get paid, you’re dead.”
In September, CVS announced its purchase of Signify Health, a high-tech company that sends out home health workers to evaluate billing rates for “high-priority” Medicare Advantage patients, according to an analyst’s report. In other words, as CVS shed one group of patients whose care yields low margins, it was spending $8 billion to seek more profitable ones.
CVS “pivots when necessary,” spokesperson Mike DeAngelis told KHN. “We decided to focus more resources on patients who receive infusion services for specialty medications” that “continue to see sustained growth.” Optum declined to discuss its move, but a spokesperson said the company was “steadfastly committed to serving the needs” of more than 2,000 HPN patients.
DeAngelis said CVS worked with its HPN patients to “seamlessly transition their care” to new companies.
However, several Coram patients interviewed about the transition indicated it was hardly smooth. Other HPN businesses were strained by the new demand for services, and frightening disruptions occurred.
Smith had to convince her new supplier that she still needed two IV pumps — one for HPN, the other for hydration. Without two, she’d rely partly on “gravity” infusion, in which the IV bag hangs from a pole that must move with the patient, making it impossible for her to keep her job.
“They just blatantly told her they weren’t giving her a pump because it was more expensive, she didn’t need it, and that’s why Coram went out of business,” Smith said.
Many patients who were hospitalized at the time of the switch — several inpatient stays a year are not unusual for HPN patients — had to remain in the hospital until they could find new suppliers. Such hospitalizations typically cost at least $3,000 a day.
“The biggest problem was getting people out of the hospital until other companies had ramped up,” said Dr. David Seres, a professor of medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center. Even over a few days, he said, “there was a lot of emotional hardship and fear over losing long-term relationships.”
To address HPN patients’ nutritional needs, a team of physicians, nurses, and dietitians must work with their supplier, Seres said. The companies conduct weekly bloodwork and adjust the contents of the HPN bags, all under sterile conditions because these patients are at risk of blood infections, which can be grave.
As for Coram, “it’s pretty obvious they had to trim down business that was not making money,” Reddick said, adding that it was noteworthy both Coram and Optum Rx “pivoted the same way to focus on higher-dollar, higher-reimbursement, high-margin populations.”
“I get it, from the business perspective,” Smith said. “At the same time, they left a lot of patients in a not great situation.”
***
Elizabeth Fisher Smith sits with husband Matt and dogs Caspian and Gretl at the table where she spends hours every day preparing IV hydration and nutrition, on which she depends to survive.(Arthur Allen / KHN)
Smith shares a postage-stamp Queens apartment with her husband, Matt; his enormous flight simulator (he’s an amateur pilot); cabinets and fridges full of medical supplies; and two large, friendly dogs, Caspian and Gretl. On a recent morning, she went about her routine: detaching the bag of milky IV fluid that had pumped all night through a central line implanted in her chest, flushing the line with saline, injecting medications into another saline bag, and then hooking it through a paperback-sized pump into her central line.
Smith has a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which can cause many health problems. As a child, Smith had frequent issues such as a torn Achilles tendon and shoulder dislocations. In her 20s, while working as an EMT, she developed severe gut blockages and became progressively less able to digest food. In 2017, she went on HPN and takes nothing by mouth except for an occasional sip of liquid or bite of soft food, in hopes of preventing the total atrophy of her intestines. HPN enabled her to commute to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where in 2020 she completed a master’s in public health.
On days when she teaches at LaGuardia Community College — she had 35 students this semester — Smith is up at 6 a.m. to tend to her medical care, leaves the house at 9:15 for class, comes home in the afternoon for a bag of IV hydration, then returns for a late afternoon or evening class. In the evening she gets more hydration, then hooks up the HPN bag for the night. On rare occasions she skips the HPN, “but then I regret it,” she said. The next day she’ll have headaches and feel dizzy, sometimes losing her train of thought in class.
Smith describes a “love-hate relationship” with HPN. She hates being dependent on it, the sour smell of the stuff when it spills, and the mountains of unrecyclable garbage from the 120 pounds of supplies couriered to her apartment weekly. She worries about blood clots and infections. She finds the smell of food disconcerting; Matt tries not to cook when she’s home. Other HPN patients speak of sudden cravings for pasta or Frosted Mini-Wheats.
Yet HPN “has given me my life back,” Smith said.
She is a zealous self-caretaker, but some dangers are beyond her control. IV feeding over time is associated with liver damage. The assemblage of HPN bags by compounding pharmacists is risky. If the ingredients aren’t mixed in the right order, they can crystallize and kill a patient, said Seres, Smith’s doctor.
He and other doctors would like to transition patients to food, but this isn’t always possible. Some eventually seek drastic treatments such as bowel lengthening or even transplants of the entire digestive tract.
“When they run out of options, they could die,” said Dr. Ryan Hurt, a Mayo Clinic physician and president of the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition.
***
And then there are the shortages.
In 2017, Hurricane Maria crippled dozens of labs and factories making IV components in Puerto Rico; next came the covid-19 emergency, which shifted vital supplies to gravely ill hospital patients.
Prices for vital HPN ingredients can fluctuate unpredictably as companies making them come and go. For example, in recent years the cost of the sodium acetate used as an electrolyte in a bag of HPN ballooned from $2 to $25, then briefly to $300, said Michael Rigas, a co-founder of the home infusion pharmacy KabaFusion.
“There may be 50 different companies involved in producing everything in an HPN bag,” Rigas said. “They’re all doing their own thing — expanding, contracting, looking for ways to make money.” This leaves patients struggling to deal with various shortages from saline and IV bags to special tubing and vitamins.
“In the last five years I’ve seen more things out of stock or on shortage than the previous 35 years combined,” said Rigas.
The sudden retrenchment of CVS and Optum Rx made things worse. Another, infuriating source of worry: the steady rise of IV spas and concierge services, staffed by moonlighting or burned-out hospital nurses, offering IV vitamins and hydration to well-off people who enjoy the rush of infusions to relieve symptoms of a cold, morning sickness, a hangover, or just a case of the blahs.
In January, infusion professionals urged FDA Commissioner Robert Califf to examine spa and concierge services’ use of IV products as an “emerging contributing factor” to shortages.
Bracha Banayan’s concierge service, called IVDRIPS, started in 2017 in New York City and now employs 90 people, including 60 registered nurses, in four states, she said. They visit about 5,000 patrons each year, providing IV hydration and vitamins in sessions of an hour or two for up to $600 a visit. The goal is “to hydrate and be healthy” with a “boost that makes us feel better,” Banayan said.
Although experts don’t recommend IV hydration outside of medical settings, the market has exploded, Banayan said: “Every med spa is like, ‘We want to bring in IV services.’ Every single paramedic I know is opening an IV center.”
Matt Smith, Elizabeth’s husband, isn’t surprised. Educated as a lawyer, he is a paramedic who trains others at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “You give someone a choice of go up to some rich person’s apartment and start an IV on them, or carry a 500-pound person living in squalor down from their apartment,” he said. “There’s one that’s going to be very hard on your body and one very easy on your body.”
The very existence of IV spa companies can feel like an insult.
“These people are using resources that are literally a matter of life or death to us,” Elizabeth Smith said.
For five months last year, Rylee Cornwell, 18 and living in Spokane, Washington, could rarely procure lipids for her HPN treatment. She grew dizzy or fainted when she tried to stand, so she mostly slept. Eventually she moved to Phoenix, where the Mayo Clinic has many Ehlers-Danlos patients and supplies are easier to access.
Mike Sherels was a University of Minnesota Gophers football coach when an allergic reaction caused him to lose most of his intestines. At times he’s had to rely on an ethanol solution that damages the ports on his central line, a potentially deadly problem “since you can only have so many central access sites put into your body during your life,” he said.
When Faith Johnson, a 22-year-old Las Vegas student, was unable to get IV multivitamins, she tried crushing vitamin pills and swallowing the powder, but couldn’t keep the substance down and became malnourished. She has been hospitalized five times this past year.
Dread stalks Matt Smith, who daily fears that Elizabeth will call to say she has a headache, which could mean a minor allergic or viral issue — or a bloodstream infection that will land her in the hospital.
Even more worrying, he said: “What happens if all these companies stop doing it? What is the alternative? I don’t know what the economics of HPN are. All I know is the stuff either comes or it doesn’t.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of other federal politicians – including two Democrats and one Republican – have shelled out countless numbers in campaign payments to a Chinese international agent, a Fox News Electronic assessment of marketing campaign finance information has uncovered.
Reps. Kevin Mullin, D.-Calif., Grace Meng, D.-N.Y, and Nicole Malliotakis, R.-N.Y. joined Ocasio Cortez in pushing marketing campaign cash to Sing Tao U.S., a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-centered Sing Tao Information Corporation Ltd, for advertising costs during the midterm election cycle.
Those people strategies, in other words and phrases, had despatched their income to a Chinese-owned entity that the Department of Justice compelled to register as a Chinese foreign agent in August 2021 as tensions rose among Washington and Beijing.
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Rep. Ocasio Cortez’s marketing campaign has shelled out $1,500 to Sing Tao Newspapers, which is a Chinese foreign agent. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Get in touch with, Inc by way of Getty Photographs)
Soon after the DOJ decided that Sing Tao U.S. constituted overseas political action, the campaigns had all disbursed their money to the enterprise.
Ocasio-Cortez’s marketing campaign dropped virtually $1,500 on adverts with Sing Tao Newspapers during the midterm election cycle after it had registered as a foreign agent, while Reps. Mullin, Meng, and Malliotakis paid involving $1,000 and $7,000 to many Sing Tao entities as section of their marketing campaign advertising fees, Federal Election Fee filings demonstrate.
Sing Tao’s United States functions include Chinese language publications in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It also has a radio station in Burlingame, California.
Rep. Grace Meng has also paid out a lot more than $1,000 to Sing Tao for advertising expenses.
The paper is considered pro-Beijing and receives additional than 50 percent of its information from the Chinese firm Star Creation (Shenzhen) Minimal, Axios previously famous.
Whilst Sing Tao U.S. has taken care of it really is free from Chinese Communist Occasion affect, China’s governing administration maintains a single of the “world’s most restrictive media environments, relying on censorship to handle facts in the information, on the web, and on social media,” the Council on Overseas Relations wrote.
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Rep. Nicole Malliotakis also dished out 1000’s to Sing Tao throughout the midterm elections. (Fox News Electronic / Jon Michael Raasch)
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The Chinese government has lower off media access to its citizens, monitored and quashed publications, and thrown dissident journalists in prison as section of its restricted-knit media handle procedure.
None of the campaigns returned a Fox Information Digital ask for for remark
Joe Schoffstall is a politics producer/reporter for Fox News Electronic. Story strategies can be despatched to Joe.Schoffstall@Fox.com and on Twitter: @joeschoffstall
Virginia’s biggest university technique unsuccessful to offer a adequate schooling to countless numbers of students with disabilities through the coronavirus pandemic, in accordance to a federal investigation into its programming.
Virginia’s biggest school technique failed to give a enough training to countless numbers of learners with disabilities all through the coronavirus pandemic, a federal investigation into its programing uncovered.
The faculty procedure will carry out a evaluate of which pupils with disabilities did not obtain sufficient instruction, and appoint an administrator to oversee these endeavours, the U.S. Division of Education’s Office of Civil Rights said.
The investigation found Fairfax County Public Educational institutions unsuccessful to offer thousands of youngsters with providers specific in their Individualized Education and learning Plans and 504 strategies for the duration of remote learning, or to give them a absolutely free, proper general public instruction, which is necessary by federal civil legal rights legislation.
The results paint a dire picture of the providers presented throughout the height of the pandemic, and occur approximately two months immediately after a two-calendar year overview of the county’s exclusive instruction program discovered that pupils with disabilities are disproportionately suspended. That assessment, even though, evaluated details and trends from in advance of the pandemic.
“I am relieved that the extra than 25,000 students with disabilities in Fairfax County will now obtain companies federal law guarantees to them, even throughout a pandemic, to be certain their equivalent accessibility to education and learning,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon in a assertion.
In a statement, Fairfax County General public Faculties mentioned it “remains dedicated to operating diligently to give the aid necessary to assure just about every and every university student recovers from studying reduction. FCPS has and will proceed to leverage means to make sure learners with the finest will need get prioritized guidance for enhanced outcomes.”
‘Free proper public education’
As the county transitioned to digital mastering, according to the investigation’s results, the director of the Office of Particular Schooling and Procedural Assistance explained what the school technique provided was a “free proper public education and learning in gentle of the circumstances.” That was clarified to signify carrying out “the best they could to provide what a student necessary to receive a FAPE” in a distant finding out ecosystem.
Even so, the investigation located the county did not, or couldn’t, offer you a enough training to thousands of pupils with disabilities. Beginning in spring 2020 and continuing the adhering to university calendar year, Fairfax County “categorically lowered and/or restricted the expert services and specific instruction that students have been entitled to get as a result of their IEPs or Area 504 designs.”
Staffing difficulties might have also resulted in some students not receiving supplemental companies they’re entitled to, these types of as summer programming in 2021 and property-based companies in 2020.
In the course of the pandemic, in accordance to the investigation, the university procedure did not “sufficiently” observe services it did offer to pupils with disabilities. It also did not craft a program to enable students get back again on track, and its restoration companies fell short of what is required to remedy the deficiency of a absolutely free acceptable public schooling.
As of February 2022, 1,070 children with IEPs and 8 students with Part 504 options received restoration expert services the county has far more than 25,000 learners with disabilities.
The college procedure has agreed to talk to moms and dads, guardians and college students to publicize its prepare for compensatory schooling and present direction or instruction about the plan to division personnel, according to a information launch.
