Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced what he called Russia’s attempt to eliminate “the whole nation” during an appearance Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” saying, “this is genocide.”
Driving the news: The International Criminal Court last month launched an investigation into allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed in Ukraine.
Zelensky has previously called certain acts of Russian aggression, such as the shelling of a children’s hospital and maternity ward in Mariupol, proof of genocide.
As Ukrainian forces retook the Kyiv region on Saturday, officials and independent photographers have reported bodies of civilians — some with their hands tied behind their backs — strewn in the streets of the city of Bucha.
What they’re saying: Asked if Russia’s actions amount to genocide, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the U.S. “will look hard and document everything that we see, put it all together, make sure the relevant institutions and organizations looking at this — including the state department — have everything they need to assess what took place in Ukraine, who’s responsible and what it amounts to.”
U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement Sunday that Russia’s attacks on civilians in Ukraine “must be investigated as war crimes,” adding that the U.K. will support any efforts by the ICC to do so, the Guardian reported.
“It is a brutality against civilians. We haven’t seen in — in Europe for decades and it’s horrific and it’s absolutely unacceptable that civilians are targeted and killed, and it just — underlines importance that this war must end and that is president Putin’s responsibility to stop the war,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Sunday on “State of the Union.”
“Is this genocide?” @margbrennan asks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Indeed. This is genocide,” Zelenskyy says, adding that Ukraine is being “destroyed and exterminated” by Russian forces.
In Bucha outside Kyiv today, I met this amazing Food Fighter! He’s a chef…now on the front lines as medic and helping @WCKitchen bring meals & food to formerly occupied towns. His restaurant in normal times? Cafe Peace!! #ChefsForUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/n1kS7Wh9qp
Breaking: US is expected to help facilitate transfer of tanks from NATO allies to Ukraine, according to senior US officials. The tanks will be Soviet-era T-72 tanks, which Ukrainian military has experience operating and will be delivered “within days, not weeks,” I’m told.
“We found 18 bodies in there. They had been torturing people. Some of them had their ears cut off. Others had teeth pulled out. There were kids like 14, 16 years old, some adults. They just took the bodies away yesterday.” #UkraineRussiaWarhttps://t.co/7UOX3QNk9Q
An Alabama bill that would require all women between the ages of 13 and 50 to show a negative pregnancy test before being able to buy medical marijuana is “unprecedented” and “clearly unconstitutional,” advocates say.
The bill, introduced by practicing OB/GYN and state Sen. Larry Stutts, R-Tuscumbia, would require “all women of childbearing age” to either test negative on a doctor-administered pregnancy test or show documentation from a “certified medical lab” that they are not pregnant.
The legislation, which passed the Senate Children, Youth and Human Services Committee on Thursday, would also ban breastfeeding women from obtaining medical marijuana.
The bill would allow breastfeeding women to obtain medical marijuana for someone else if they are doing so as a registered caregiver.
“I’m still not in favor of the marijuana bill, but it is in place. I think it can be improved and one of the ways it can be improved is to limit pregnant people, limit their availability to it,” he said on the Jeff Poor Show.
“There’s a lot of data about marijuana and pregnancy … and recommending not to do it. I counsel patients all the time that are pregnant about not taking drugs and not smoking marijuana during their pregnancy, not smoking cigarettes during their pregnancy.”
While the state legislature passed medical marijuana and Gov. Kay Ivey signed the bill into law last year, licenses have yet to be issued and there are no active marijuana dispensaries in Alabama.
Emma Roth, a staff attorney with the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said no state has a law mandating women show a negative pregnancy test before obtaining medical marijuana.
“This is completely unprecedented because it is so clearly unconstitutional,” she said.
Roth said Oklahoma considered a similar provision in 2018 through executive order but backed off amid the high possibility of a legal challenge.
“We have serious concerns, just from a constitutional perspective and a public health perspective” about Stutts’ bill, Roth said.
“We are very concerned that this is an invasion of the privacy of Alabama women and their right to equal protection under the law.”
Roth noted that a home pregnancy test would not be sufficient under the bill’s language.
Legal issues aside, the legislation is also “not grounded in science,” she said, pointing to a 2020 study that found evidence does not suggest that prenatal cannabis use leads to cognitive impairments.
There are several conditions where medical marijuana is helpful for pregnant women, such as epilepsy and hyperemesis gravidarum — a severe form of morning sickness that can lead to weight loss, studies show.
Katie Darovitz, an Alabama woman with epilepsy, was told by her doctor to stop her anti-epileptic medication when she became pregnant because of their links to birth defects. She turned to marijuana to prevent her seizures.
Alabama was one of a handful of states where mothers can be prosecuted for exposing an unborn child to illicit drugs under the state’s chemical endangerment of a child law at the time.
In part because of Darovitz’ case and an AL.com and ProPublica investigation into the drug arrests of pregnant women with legal prescriptions, the Alabama Legislature amended the chemical endangerment law to exclude such women from the chemical endangerment
Darovitz’ charges were ultimately dropped, but Roth said her case showed that the decision on whether to obtain medical marijuana should be up to a woman and her doctor, not the Alabama Legislature.
“This legislation would prevent pregnant women from getting medical marijuana even when she and doctor agree it’s in the best interest of her health and the health of her baby,” she said.
A Chippewa Falls attorney who is a key player in a movement to take the impossible step of decertifying the 2020 election is running for attorney general on a platform of using the office to prosecute doctors who did not administer the anti-parasite drug ivermectin to dying COVID-19 patients and instead gave them other treatments.
Mueller said in an interview she is launching a campaign in order to investigate six Wisconsin hospitals for their doctors’ decisions to not administer ivermectin to COVID-19 patients. She would not disclose the names of the hospitals or reveal details of her allegations.
Mueller said the CDC and FDA are “liars” and that families have called her “begging for help, trying to figure out what to do because their loved ones were in hospitals and the families believed that those loved ones were basically being murdered. And they had the drugs withheld from them.”
“I am running for attorney general because of potential homicides in hospitals, because of vaccines — so-called vaccines,” she said.
Mueller, who said she took ivermectin last year while infected with COVID-19, said she did not consult a doctor or scientist to analyze whether the deaths or illnesses could have been prevented by the drug that doctors and researchers say has not been proven to be effective against the coronavirus. She said a trial would root out the facts of the situation.
Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Preventive Medicine Residency Program, said doctors who do not prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients are upholding the Hippocratic oath to do no harm to patients by making decisions according to the consensus of available credible medical research.
“We strive to get it right. We do the best job we can to do no harm, and this is an example that would be unthinkable to me to ask a physician to prescribe a medicine that is at best ineffective and at worst harmful,” Remington said.
“There are valid debates about the best ways to treat serious illnesses and science is iterative, that as we go along we learn by experimentation, we learn by carefully conducted research,” he said.
“Ivermectin has undergone that scrutiny from early anecdotal evidence that it might be effective to well-conducted scientific studies that show that not only is it not effective but it can be harmful, and no credible medical organization or professional organization recommends it,” Remington said.
A large clinical trial published Wednesday involving about 3,500 people infected with COVID-19 showed ivermectin did not lower the incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of COVID-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis.
The study compared about 1,300 people in Brazil who received either ivermectin or a placebo. The rest received a different treatment.
Retail prescriptions for ivermectin surged in late 2020 before vaccines were widely available and after a catastrophic surge of COVID-19 cases. In December 2020, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson held a Senate hearing in which physician witnesses touted the drug as a COVID treatment and claimed positive research about ivermectin was being ignored.
Pierre Kory, a Wisconsin physician and one of ivermectin’s most vociferous promoters, testified at Johnson’s hearing that if people took the drug they would not get sick. Eight months later, despite taking ivermectin weekly, Kory came down with COVID-19.
Mueller cites Kory’s opinion in her effort to pursue civil penalties, and if elected, criminal charges against doctors who have refused to prescribe the drug in cases where patients died.
“What I would do if I became attorney general is I would open investigations into those deaths and if the facts were substantiated, I would probably bring charges against the people that were responsible for this,” Mueller said.
She said she is working on a civil lawsuit against multiple health care systems with multiple plaintiffs but declined to disclose details.
In October, Mueller represented the family of a Waukesha County man who was infected with COVID-19 in their pursuit of an order forcing Aurora Health Care officials to honor a prescription for ivermectin written by a doctor not authorized to practice medicine at the Aurora hospital where the man was in a drug-induced coma and breathing with a ventilator.
Asked Supreme Court to invalidate the 2020 election
In November 2020, Mueller asked the state Supreme Court to throw out the results of the presidential election because the use of ballot drop boxes were illegal, in her view.
The court rejected the petition from Mueller but in a recent ruling barred the use of drop boxes in the April 5 and subsequent elections because state law is silent on whether they are allowed. A final ruling is pending.
Mueller said she is running because she has not seen enough interest from the other Republican candidates — former state Rep. Adam Jarchow and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney — in COVID-19 and election issues. She said Attorney General Josh Kaul, the Democratic incumbent, should investigate doctors’ decisions surrounding COVID-19 infections.
Kaul and Toney declined to comment. Jarchow did not respond to a request for comment.
Several hundred Russian troops reportedly rushed to a special medical facility in Belarus after digging in radioactive soil in a forest near the infamous nuclear plant.
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Correspondent-At-Large
SeanGallup
Several hundred Russian soldiers were forced to hastily withdraw from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine after suffering “acute radiation sickness” from contaminated soil, according to Ukrainian officials.
The troops, who dug trenches in a contaminated Red Forest near the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, are now reportedly being treated in a special medical facility in Gomel, Belarus. The forest is so named because thousands of pine trees turned red during the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area is considered so highly toxic that not even highly specialized Chernobyl workers are allowed to enter the zone.
Energoatom, the Ukrainian agency in charge of the country’s nuclear power stations, said the Russian soldiers had panicked and fled.
“It has been confirmed that the occupiers who seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and other facilities in the Exclusion Zone set off in two columns towards Ukraine’s border with Belarus. The occupiers announced their intentions to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant this morning to the Ukrainian personnel of the station,” the agency said in a statement on Telegram, adding that a small number of Russians still remained at the facility.
The agency said it had also confirmed reports of Russian forces digging trenches in the Red Forest, “the most polluted in the entire exclusion zone.”
“Not surprisingly, the occupiers received significant doses of radiation and panicked at the first sign of illness. And it showed up very quickly.”
Local reports suggest that seven buses with the zapped troops arrived in Gomel early Thursday. Journalists on the ground have also reported “ghost buses” of dead soldiers being transported from Belarus to Russia under the cover of dark.
U.S. intelligence reported Wednesday that Russian forces began withdrawing from the defunct site. Russia said the withdrawal from Chernobyl was part of a pledge to scale back the invasion. But Ukrainian media says it is actually because the troops were “irradiated” from the contaminated soil.
“Another batch of Russian irradiated terrorists who seized the Chernobyl zone was brought to the Belarusian Radiation Medicine Center in Gomel today,” Yaroslav Yemelianenko, who works for the Public Council at the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management, posted on Facebook. “There are rules for dealing with this territory.”
The Chernobyl facility fell to Russian control on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion. Workers were on duty for more than 600 hours before being allowed a shift change. International concern grew immediately when Russian troops moved heavy military hardware through the area, kicking up radioactive dust without any protective equipment. Forest fires in the area also raised concern about environmental contamination.
Digging trenches in the forest—considered the most contaminated area of the site—drew widespread ridicule from Ukrainians who work at the site.
#UPDATE Russian forces have begun to pull out of the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power site, a US defense official said Wednesday, a day after Moscow said it would scale back attacks on two key Ukrainian cities https://t.co/apsEuYTsif
"The regular soldiers one of the workers spoke to when they worked alongside them in the facility had not heard about the explosion, he said." Unprotected Russian soldiers disturbed radioactive dust in Chernobyl's 'Red Forest', workers say https://t.co/NZZnF1hhHy
Russian soldiers who seized the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster drove their armoured vehicles without radiation protection through a highly toxic zone called the "Red Forest", kicking up clouds of radioactive dust, workers at the site said. https://t.co/efcDfBORAa
Seven busses packed with Russian soldiers suffering from Acute Radiation Syndrome arrived to #Belarus from the #Ukrainian#Chernobyl exclusion zone. Source: member of public council of state #Ukraine agency of exclusion zone Yaroslav Yemelyanenko via Unian news agency.
The anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which has surged in popularity as an alternative treatment for Covid-19 despite a lack of strong research to back it up, showed no sign of alleviating the disease, according to results of a large clinical trial published on Wednesday.
The study, which compared more than 1,300 people infected with the coronavirus in Brazil who received either ivermectin or a placebo, effectively ruled out the drug as a treatment for Covid, the study’s authors said.
Ivermectin’s popularity continued to climb in the pandemic’s second year. The podcaster Joe Rogan promoted it repeatedly on his shows. In a single week in August, U.S. insurance companies spent $2.4 million paying for ivermectin treatments
Breaking News: Ivermectin failed as a Covid treatment, a large clinical trial found. The drug surged in popularity despite no strong evidence that it worked. https://t.co/mvTqgZ5DR8
The guys who think everything is a conspiracy theory fell for the dopiest conspiracy theory of the century. Congrats to whoever decided to trick Facebook addicts and Rogan fans into taking recreational horse dewormer. https://t.co/UPDZQ5HNpL
Scottie's Playtime 