True crime. Social justice. Impact. To miss it would be a crime.
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FLORENCE, Italy (Reuters) – A meeting of European Union foreign ministers will be held next week should countries from the bloc fail to reach an agreement over an oil embargo against Russia by the weekend, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Friday.
The European Commission is proposing changes to its planned embargo on Russian oil in a bid to win over reluctant states, including Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an event in Florence, Borrell reiterated he had faith in reaching “a solution that is shared, as not all countries are in the same situation,” adding a deal had to be found quickly.
The European Union’s executive proposed the oil embargo on Wednesday as part of a wider package of EU sanctions on Russia – the sixth since Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what the Kremlin calls “a special military operation”.
Asked about a possible embargo on gas imports, Borrell said “gas is not for tomorrow, (but) for the day after tomorrow,” indicating the EU needed to take one step at a time in its sanctions against Russia.
Earlier on Friday he said the bloc needed to be “realistic” in its plans to become independent from Russian energy and that it needed to do so in an “orderly and prudent way.”
“Gas cannot be substituted with something else… if it’s not Russian gas it needs to be gas anyway,” he said.
Europe, which sources about 40% of its gas imports from Russia, has been scrambling to diversify its energy supply mix as the conflict in Ukraine escalates.
The top diplomat added there were several ways of hitting Russia’s oil exports and that action might not be just limited to a simple ban on buying the oil.
“If insurance companies don’t provide the insurance for the transportation of Russian oil, it’s going to be a big problem for Russian oil exports – not only to the EU but to rest of world,” he said, without giving further details.
(Reporting by Silvia Ognibene in Florence and Giulia Segreti in Rome, editing by Maria Pia Quaglia and Raissa Kasolowsky)
By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House will set a mininum annual pay for its staff at $45,000, months after a non-profit report found that over 12% of congressional staffers did not have a living wage.
“I am pleased to announce that ….. the House will for the first time ever set the minimum annual pay for staff at $45,000,” Pelosi said in a letter to lawmakers dated Friday.
The step would go into effect from September, she added.
A report from a non-profit earlier this year found that one in eight congressional staffers in Washington, DC, are not paid a living wage.
The report had compared staff salaries in Congress to the living wage in Washington, D.C., which is $42,610 for an adult without children, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In her letter on Friday, Pelosi also acknowledged that young staffers “often earn the lowest salaries.” The letter was first reported by Punchbowl News.
“This is also an issue of fairness, as many of the youngest staffers working the longest hours often earn the lowest salaries”, Pelosi said.
Last year, over 100 U.S. lawmakers, led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had called for higher wages for congressional staffers in order to better retain employees working for members of Congress.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington, Editing by Louise Heavens)
The splashdown went to plan, marking the end of the crew’s 176-day mission and the maiden voyage of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
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By Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. lawmakers attempting to cut the cost of insulin for more than a million Americans to $35 per month are unlikely to succeed as November elections draw near and complicate bipartisan support, health policy and political experts say.
The U.S. House of Representatives in March passed a bill capping monthly out-of-pocket insulin costs for those with health insurance at $35. Senators are drafting a wider bill that also provides incentive for drugmakers to lower list prices.
Both houses must pass the same legislation for it to move forward.
The Democratic-backed legislation was once seen as likely to garner the support it needed because it sidestepped requiring drug companies to cut prices, which the pharmaceutical industry would have fought. Some Republicans have said they support drug pricing reform.
Health policy experts, pharmaceutical industry sources, patient advocates and Congressional staffers told Reuters that insulin legislation faces significant obstacles. Some said Democrats were still hoping to get support from 10 Republicans needed in the Senate to pass the bill.
“As we inch closer and closer to the summer and to the election, it seems like there may not be a lot of appetite to potentially give Democrats a win going into the elections,” said Ipsita Smolinski, managing director at research firm Capitol Street.
Around 8.4 million of the 37 million people in the United States with diabetes use insulin, according to the American Diabetes Association.
About one-in-five insured Americans pay more than $35 per month for the treatment, while the rest pay about $23 dollars per month, according to a 2021 report on drug prices by health information company IQVIA. Monthly out-of-pocket costs for insulin are already capped by 20 states and the District of Columbia. In nine of those states and D.C., the cap is $35 or lower, the ADA said.
The bill would help the estimated 1.7 million people who have private insurance or Medicare coverage and pay more than $35 a month for insulin because of their location, the design of their insurance plan, or the specific insulin they need.
Laura Marston, co-founder of advocacy group The Insulin Initiative, said the bill would only have lowered the co-pays for about 20% of diabetes patients, and that her organization will continue to battle for lower list prices.
“From my perspective, it’s not a setback in our fight to cap the price, not just the co-pay, of insulin for all,” she said.
About 17% of insulin users ages 18 to 64, or some 5 million to 6 million people, were uninsured or had a gap in coverage, according to a 2020 Commonwealth Fund study. Two thirds of that group paid the full price – an average of $900 a month – for the life-sustaining medicine.
That has left many people rationing or skipping insulin doses, endangering their health.
PHRMA VS AHIP
The legislation has the support of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry trade group, and insulin makers. Three companies, Sanofi SA, Eli Lilly and Co, and Novo Nordisk make up 90% of the market for insulin, which was invented in the 1920s.
“A $35 co-pay cap is an elegant policy solution to help people afford their insulin,” said Eli Lilly executive Shawn O’Neail.
Insurers would have to pass the after-market discounts they receive from drugmakers to patients rather than integrating them in the monthly premium price for everyone, O’Neail and other industry sources said.
AHIP, the health insurance industry’s largest trade group, said capping the co-pays would result in a cost shift that would result in higher insurance premiums.
CVS Health Corp, Cigna Corp, and UnitedHealth Group Inc are among the largest managers of pharmacy and health insurance benefits.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that setting that $35 co-pay would cost the U.S. government $20 billion over 10 years as premiums in government-sponsored Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid plans rise.
Higher private insurance premiums also would lead to lower wages and therefore lower tax revenue, the CBO said.
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Caroline Humer and Bill Berkrot)
By Rowena Edwards
LONDON (Reuters) -Oil prices climbed for a third straight session on Friday, shrugging off concerns about global economic growth as impending European Union sanctions on Russian oil raised the prospect of tighter supply.
Brent futures rose $1.75, or 1.58%, to $112.65 per barrel by 1159 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude climbed $1.57, or 1.45%, to $109.83 a barrel.
Brent and WTI are on track to rise for a second week in a row, buoyed by the EU’s proposal to phase out supplies of Russian crude oil in six months and refined products by the end of 2022. It would also ban all shipping and insurance services for transporting Russian oil.
The EU is tweaking its sanctions plan in a bid to win over reluctant states, three EU sources told Reuters on Friday. [nL2N2WY0F7]
“The looming EU embargo on Russian oil has the makings of an acute supply squeeze. In any case, OPEC+ is in no mood to help out, even as rallying energy prices spur harmful levels of inflation,” PVM analyst Stephen Brennock said.
Ignoring calls from Western nations to hike output more, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and allied producers, a group known as OPEC+, stuck with its plan to raise its June output target by 432,000 barrels per day. nL2N2WX0IO]
However, analysts expect the group’s actual production rise to be much smaller as a result of capacity constraints.
“There is zero chance of certain members filling that quota as production challenges impact Nigeria and other African members,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst Asia Pacific at OANDA.
A U.S. Senate panel has advanced a bill that could expose OPEC+ to lawsuits for collusion on boosting oil prices.
Investors are also eyeing higher demand from the United States this fall as Washington unveiled plans to buy 60 million barrels of crude for its emergency stockpiles.
Demand concerns on signs of a weakening global economy capped the price rise.
The Bank of England on Thursday warned that Britain risks a double-whammy of a recession and inflation above 10% as it raised interest rates to their highest since 2009, hiking by a quarter of a percentage point to 1%.
And strict COVID-19 curbs in China are creating headwinds in the second quarter for the world’s second-largest economy.
(Additional reporting by Florence Tan in Singapore and Laura Sanicola in New York; editing by Jason Neely)
By Jonathan Landay
KYIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -Amnesty International said on Friday there was compelling evidence that Russian troops had committed war crimes, including extrajudicial executions of civilians, when they occupied an area outside Ukraine’s capital in February and March.
Civilians also suffered abuses such as “reckless shootings and torture” at the hands of Russian forces during their failed onslaught on Kyiv in the early stages of the invasion launched by the Kremlin on Feb. 24, the rights group said in a report.
“These are not isolated incidents. These are very much part of a pattern wherever Russian forces were in control of a town or a village,” Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response adviser, told a news conference in Kyiv.
Information collected by the group “can be used, hopefully, for holding the perpetrators to account, if not today, one day in the future”, she said.
Russia, which calls its invasion a “special operation” to disarm Ukraine and protect it from fascists, denies its forces committed abuses. Kyiv and its Western backers say the fascism claim is a false pretext for an unprovoked war of aggression.
Ukrainian authorities say they are investigating more than 9,000 potential war crimes by Russian troops. The International Criminal Court is also looking into alleged war crimes.
The Amnesty report is the latest to document alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces when they occupied an area northwest of Kyiv, including the town of Bucha, where Ukrainian authorities say more than 400 civilians were killed. Moscow withdrew its troops in early April.
‘UNLAWFUL KILLINGS’
The report concluded that Russian troops had committed a “host of apparent war crimes” in Bucha, including “numerous unlawful killings”, most of them near the intersection of Yablunska and Vodoprovidna streets.
A Reuters investigation published on Thursday documented clues, including testimony and evidence focused on Yablunska Street, to the identities of individual Russian soldiers and military units present in Bucha.
The units included the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, which the Amnesty report also found was present in the town.
Rovera said she collected in Bucha armour-piercing bullets and shell casings produced at a plant in Tula, south of Moscow, for rifles used only by elite Russian airborne units whose presence in Bucha Amnesty had confirmed.
“We also found and were able to view some military documents that indicate the presence of these special units in these places where these crimes were committed,” she said.
Amnesty said it had documented 22 cases of unlawful killing by Russian forces – “most of which were apparent extrajudicial executions” – in Bucha and nearby areas.
Asked by Reuters before the Amnesty report about Russia’s operation in Bucha, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “The Bucha story is a set-up and a fake”.
Amnesty also said in its report Russian airstrikes that hit eight residential buildings on March 1-2 in the town of Borodyanka, killing at least 40 civilians, were “disproportionate and indiscriminate, and apparent war crimes”.
“Russian forces cannot credibly claim to have been unaware that civilians were living in the targeted buildings,” it said.
(Reporting by Jonathan LandayEditing by Gareth Jones)
Cost of “breaker” eggs — liquidized eggs sold to restaurants and packaged-food producers — nearly tripled in May.
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