The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

The situation in the morning - Nobel Peace Prize 2022, Markus Söder, German children's hospitals

2022-12-10T07:15:30.223Z


Several human rights activists will be presented with the Nobel Peace Prize today. Markus Söder is on a really big tour. And the conditions in children's hospitals are terrible. That's the situation on Saturday.


»Fight for Democracy and Freedom«

This Saturday is International Human Rights Day.

And today at noon, this year's Nobel Peace Prize will be presented in Oslo.

In the year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is also all about human rights.

The winners are the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), the human rights organization Memorial, which is banned in Russia, and the imprisoned Belarusian human rights lawyer Ales Beljazki,

who is being represented by his wife in Oslo City Hall.

When the names of the award winners were announced in early October, CCL chairwoman Oleksandra Matwijtschuk was on the train from Poland to Kiev.

Coincidentally on the same train: SPIEGEL correspondent Christian Esch.

Christian was then one of the first to be able to conduct an interview with the Nobel Prize winner while still on the train.

When asked about the significance of the award for her, Matviychuk replied: Along with Memorial and Belyatsky, the award goes "to people who have spent the greater part of their lives fighting against the common evil, namely the authoritarian regimes of Putin and Lukashenko."

That is the first dimension, »we are all human rights activists, and the fact that the armies are now speaking is because the voices of human rights activists in our region have not been heard for years«.

The second dimension: the award goes to the entire Ukrainian people, "in their struggle for democracy and freedom."

  • Nobel Peace Prize for the "Center for Civil Liberties": "It's about people who oppose evil" 

You can find more news and background information on the war in Ukraine here:

  • Is there a special tribunal for Putin?

    Ukraine wants to put Putin before a special tribunal over the war against her country.

    So far, the United States, France and Germany have rejected the plan.

    But now the resistance is crumbling. 

  • “Russia wants to change the existing order under the protection of its nuclear weapons”

    : Vladimir Putin repeatedly threatens nuclear weapons.

    Fear of a nuclear escalation in the Ukraine war is growing, especially in Germany.

    Do we have to learn to live with these worries, Claudia Major?

  • Kiev warns against fake recruitment letters for the Ukrainian army in Germany:

    The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has warned against perfidious letters in Germany.

    The forged letters offered the addressees service in the Ukrainian army – and lots of money in the event of death.

The big, colorful Söder show

For a while I reported and wrote about the CSU, of course also about Markus Söder.

At the time he was neither party leader nor prime minister, but he was all sorts of things:

JU boss, general secretary, minister for Europe, minister for the environment (he called it the minister for life), minister for finance.

But I never subjected myself to such an experiment as my colleague Sara Sievert did: Sara tried to accompany Markus Söder every step of the way for two weeks.

Enlarge image

CSU politician Söder

Photo: Peter Kneffel / dpa

The man rushes from appointment to appointment, Sara writes in her portrait:

»Like a Bavarian Taylor Swift, Söder puts on the right record at every place.

From country to hymns, what is sung is what gets it into the charts.«

The show runs on all channels, whether radio, television, social media or print.

Hardly anyone in the Free State can isolate themselves from Söder.

Almost a year before the state elections, Söder is already in full combat mode: »Every time the audience is different, so a different Söder appears every time.

Söder basically constantly adjusts its sound.

Several times a day, in his appearance at appointments.« And within a few months, as with corona policy.

Now there were only a few CSU prime ministers who were completely alien to a certain changeability.

Sometimes being for and sometimes against, playing government and opposition at the same time - the sometimes cynical mastery of this dialectic accounts for a good part of the decades-long success of the CSU.

Horst Seehofer earned the nickname »Turnhofer«.

At Söder, however, the number comes in a new quantity and quality, I learned that from Sara.

Is this due to modern times?

Or did the politician Söder simply take his party's business model to the extreme here?

I suspect the latter.

  • Two weeks on the road with Söder: like a pop star who plays the right hit for every audience 

The lean state and its consequences

I would like to share with you a story for this weekend that both shook me and also makes me angry.

It's important research.

A SPIEGEL team led by my colleague Silke Fokken looked around in German children's hospitals and described the rampant, sometimes life-threatening shortage there.

Enlarge image

Patient on children's ward in Stuttgart

Photo: Marijan Murat / dpa

It is a scandal that the medical care of the little people has been partly destroyed in this country for years.

There are areas of life that cannot be organized according to purely economic criteria.

This includes children's hospitals.

The various waves of illness this autumn and winter were not sufficient to explain the poor state of pediatric care, write Silke and her colleagues:

»They only reinforce the same problems in many places: massive staff shortages and chronic underfunding.

The viruses threaten to knock out an already sick system.«

A pediatrician from Lower Saxony reports on a six-year-old in the emergency room.

He was transported two and a half hours because there was no room for him in his hometown.

He was in a life-threatening condition.

The team "just got the boy back together," says the doctor.

"If he had had to be transported ten minutes longer, he wouldn't have made it."

  • Overloaded children's hospitals: "The safety of our patients is at risk" 

Here is the current quiz of the day

Place of the day...

... is the

seat of the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians in Hamburg

.

Because of all places, the FDP state party conference is taking place there today.

I find that funny.

The latest news from the night

  • Suspicion of corruption shakes the EU Parliament:

    The police are investigating suspected corruption in the EU Parliament, there have been searches and arrests.

    Apparently, Greek Vice President Eva Kaili is also involved – her party has already reacted.

  • Trump supporter Lake is defending herself against her defeat in the gubernatorial election:

    she lost to her opponent from the Democrats in the gubernatorial election and speaks of "illegal ballot papers": Republican Kari Lake is suing several people responsible for the vote.

  • George Floyd case – ex-policeman Kueng sentenced again:

    Another guilty verdict against ex-policeman Alexander Kueng: He has now been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for his involvement in the killing of George Floyd.

    However, Kueng is already serving a prison sentence.

The SPIEGEL + recommendations for today

  • I.

    I.

    Me:

    Africa has a lot of great football talents, but the national teams always fail because of the high expectations at a World Cup.

    The only exception: Morocco.

    How can this be explained? 

  • "I have a pronounced helper syndrome":

    A 29-year-old has been spending every free minute in the flooded Ahr Valley since the flood of July 2021.

    For weeks she toiled in the ruins of the houses.

    Why actually? 

  • Where rail travel is fun – and where it is a nuisance:

    while the 9-euro ticket is triggering a rail boom in Germany, frequent traveler Jon Worth is traveling all over Europe in 186 trains.

    And notices why the traffic turnaround is failing.

I wish you a good start into the day.

Yours, Sebastian Fischer

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-12-10

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.