Category: All

New York
CNN
 — 

CVS is buying a primary care doctor’s network, moving the pharmacy deeper into providing physician services for patients.

The company announced Wednesday that it plans to pay $10.6 billion to acquire Oak Street Health, a primary care provider mainly for adults on Medicare Advantage. Oak Street has 160 health care clinics in 21 states.

Medicare Advantage, also known as Medicare Part C, is a type of Medicare health plan offered by a private company that contracts with Medicare. It enrolls nearly half of all Medicare beneficiaries.

CVS for years built out retail stores and basic MinuteClinics. It also became a pharmacy benefits’ manager. In 2018, CVS bought Aetna, making it one of the largest health insurers in the country. Although CVS has not been a primary care practice in the past with a network of doctors, the company has said it wants to move into the area.

The company is trying to keep pace with rivals and control costs. In the future, CVS could offer an insurance plan to consumers in Oak Street’s network for lower premiums, said Sean Nicholson, the director of the Sloan Program in Health Administration at Cornell University.

A flurry of deals between health insurers and primary care providers kicked off in recent years. Insurance rivals UnitedHealth Group’s Optum arm and Humana have recently expanded their primary care services.

“In the last three years, health insurers have become increasingly interested in purchasing primary care practices and employing physicians,” Nicholson said.

Traditionally, health insurers have contracted with physicians, not employed them. But insurers believe that if they have a strong physician network, they can better control the cost and quality of medical care, he said.

Additionally, private Medicare plans typically offer higher reimbursement rates from the federal government than traditional Medicare, and CVS wants to capitalize on this, he said. The Biden administration announced a rule last week cracking down on Medicare private plans that have overcharged the federal government.

CVS’ retail rivals have also been moving into primary care.

Walgreens

(WBA) has attached doctors’ offices to hundreds of its stores in a deal with primary care network VillageMD and took a majority stake in the company. Backed by Walgreens

(WBA), VillageMD purchased primary care provider Summit Health for $9 billion earlier this year.

Amazon

(AMZN) said last year that it plans to buy primary care provider One Medical for roughly $4 billion.

London
CNN
 — 

Credit Suisse

(CS) has reported its biggest annual loss since the financial crisis in 2008, highlighting the scale of the challenge facing the scandal-plagued Swiss bank as it attempts a turnaround.

The lender on Thursday posted a loss of 1.4 billion Swiss francs ($1.5 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2022, extending a losing streak that started in 2021 and taking its full-year loss to 7.3 billion Swiss francs ($7.9 billion). In 2008, Credit Suisse made a loss of 8.2 billion Swiss francs ($8.9 billion).

The bank’s shares fell 5% in early trade. The stock has plunged 65% over the past 12 months but is up 12% so far in 2023.

Credit Suisse said in a statement that the fourth-quarter performance was impacted by “the challenging economic and market environment, significant deposit and net asset outflows at the beginning of the quarter and the execution of our strategic actions.” It added that it expected to make another “substantial loss” in 2023.

Customers withdrew 111 billion Swiss francs ($121 billion) in the final three months of 2022, when the bank was hit by social media speculation that it was on the brink of collapse.

The rumors, which sparked a selloff in the shares, followed a series of missteps and compliance failures that have cost the bank dearly.

For example, the collapse of US hedge fund Archegos Capital Management, a client of Credit Suisse, in 2021 cost the bank $5.5 billion. An independent external investigation later found “a failure to effectively manage risk.”

Credit Suisse has since embarked on a major restructuring plan that entails cutting 9,000 full-time jobs, spinning off its investment bank and focusing on wealth management.

In a step towards this, the company announced Thursday the acquisition of M. Klein & Company, an investment banking business.

Credit Suisse CEO Ulrich Körner said the deal “marks another milestone in the carve-out of CS First Boston as a leading independent capital markets and advisory business.”

The bank also announced that it had finalized the first stage of the deal to sell its securitized products group to Apollo Global Management, which is expected to conclude in the first half of this year.

“We have a clear plan to create a new Credit Suisse and intend to continue to deliver on our three-year strategic transformation by reshaping our portfolio, reallocating capital, right-sizing our cost base, and building on our leading franchises.” Körner said in the statement.

— Julia Horowitz contributed to this report.

CNN
 — 

After five Memphis police officers brutally beat Tyre Nichols last month, one officer took two cell phone photos of the visibly injured 29-year-old Black man and texted one image to at least five people, newly revealed internal police department documents show.

Demetrius Haley – one of five officers fired and charged with murder in Nichols’ death – admitted that he texted a photo to five people, including two other Memphis officers, a “female acquaintance” and a civilian employee, according to the documents, published online by CNN affiliate WMC and obtained by CNN. A sixth person was also identified as a recipient of the same photo, the documents state.

Indeed, surveillance video of the beating released to the public shows one of the officers twice held up his cell phone and shined a flashlight on Nichols.

The sharing of the photo was just one allegation among many laid out in the internal documents, which accuse the officers of a slew of misconduct and policy violations before, during and after the interaction with Nichols on January 7.

Taken together, the police documents accuse the officers of pulling over Nichols without telling him the reason for the stop, using excessive force, turning off or otherwise obscuring their body-worn cameras, “laughing and bragging” about the beating and then misleading investigators.

Also included in the documents is a sworn affidavit from one of the officers defending his actions – the first time any of the officers involved in the beating have offered their perspective on what happened.

The offenses are laid out in five decertification request letters – one for each officer – sent by the police department last month to a state commission that enforces policing standards. If their decertification is granted, they would be unable to work for other state law enforcement agencies.

Nichols is described in the letters as a nonviolent, unarmed subject who posed no significant threat to the officers. He died three days after the beating.

All five officers – Haley, Tadarrius Bean, Emmitt Martin III, Justin Smith, and Desmond Mills Jr. – were internally charged with violating the department’s policies on personal conduct, neglect of duty, excessive or unnecessary force and use of body-worn cameras, the letters show. Some also were charged with additional violations. The charges are not criminal in nature.

The documents say that all five officers declined to make any statements during the administrative hearings. In each case, the president of the police union, Lt. Essica Cage-Rosario, submitted a letter stating investigators had not provided the body-camera footage or other officer statements beforehand.

“These are only a few examples of the GROSS violations of this officer’s right to due process,” Cage-Rosario said, according to the documents.

A sixth police officer also has been fired but not charged. The officers were all members of the specialized SCORPION unit, which has since been disbanded. Further, the Fire Department fired two EMTs and a lieutenant for their inadequate response to the incident.

Seven more officers are expected to face administrative discipline related to the case, the Memphis city attorney announced Tuesday.

The Memphis City Council also approved several public safety reforms in a meeting Tuesday night, the first hearing since the video of Nichols’ beating was released. The council votes happened as Nichols’ family entered the House of Representatives chamber at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, as invited guests of first lady Jill Biden to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. Biden addressed the need for police accountability in his speech.

Nichols’ parents spoke to CNN on Wednesday morning, thanking Biden for acknowledging him and urging Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to address police reform.

“My son didn’t die for nothing,” RowVaughn Wells told CNN’s Don Lemon on CNN This Morning. “There has to be some greater good … some good will come of this.”

Video contradicts initial police report in Tyre Nichols arrest

The documents added further details to the entirety of the police interaction with Nichols, only some of which is captured on surveillance and body camera footage.

The interaction began with a traffic stop for alleged “reckless driving,” police initially said.

However, the internal police documents say Haley exited his unmarked vehicle and “forced (Nichols) out of his vehicle while using loud profanity and wearing a black sweatshirt hoodie over (his) head.” Haley “never told the driver the purpose of the vehicle stop or that he was under arrest,” the documents state.

In the following moments, Haley pepper-sprayed Nichols directly in the eyes and kicked him on the ground, the documents say.

After Nichols fled the scene, the officers caught up to him at a second location near his family home and punched and beat him as he lay restrained on the ground, the video shows.

At one point, Haley was “on an active cell phone call where the person overheard the police encounter,” the documents state.

The documents lay out numerous uses of excessive force against Nichols committed by each officer and say several of the men failed to intervene or report the violent actions of their fellow officers.

At one point, Smith and Bean held Nichols by the arms while other officers pepper-sprayed and “excessively struck” him with a baton, the department says. Smith and Bean also admitted to punching Nichols several times as they tried to handcuff him, the letters say.

After the beating, the officers can be heard on body-worn camera “making multiple unprofessional comments, laughing and bragging about (their) involvement,” the documents say.

The officers also failed to immediately provide aid in the critical moments after the beating and did not immediately help when medical personnel requested to remove Nichols’ handcuffs, the documents say. The documents also note Smith is a certified EMT.

Their conversation and inaction after the beating was witnessed by a civilian who took photos and cell phone video, the documents state.

Mills knew Nichols had been “pepper sprayed, tased, struck with an ASP baton, punched, and kicked” but didn’t provide him aid, according to the documents. Instead, he admitted in his report he walked away to decontaminate himself from the chemical irritant spray, his letter says.

About 23 minutes passed between the time Nichols appeared to be subdued and a stretcher arriving on scene, video shows.

An autopsy commissioned by Nichols’ family preliminarily found he suffered “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating.” The full report from the family’s autopsy has yet to be released. Officials have also not released Nichols’ autopsy.

After Nichols’ arrest, the officers’ statements and reports contradicted one another and omitted or distorted key details about their violence toward Nichols, according to the letters.

Their accounts were “not consistent with each other and are not consistent with the publicly known injuries and death of Mr. Nichols,” the documents say.

When speaking to Nichols’ mother after the arrest, Mills and his supervisor “refused to provide an accurate account of her son’s encounter with police or his condition,” his letter says.

Martin made “deceitful” statements in his incident summary, in which he claimed Nichols tried to grab his holstered gun as officers forced him to the ground, his letter says. Video evidence, however, “does not corroborate” his statements, it says, adding Martin never disclosed that he punched and kicked Nichols several times. Instead, it says, he said he administered “body blows.”

Haley also said in a statement and in body camera footage that he heard an officer tell Nichols, “Let my gun go!” But the claim was “deemed untruthful” after a review of video evidence, the documents say.

Both Haley and Martin were internally charged with violating the department policy against providing “knowingly incorrect, false, or deceitful” information, the documents show.

All five of the officers either never turned on their body-worn cameras or only recorded snippets of their encounter with Nichols, which is a violation of the department’s policies, the letters say.

Both Bean and Mills were initially recording their encounter with Nichols but removed their cameras while the scene was still active, their letters state.

Bean took the camera off his vest and left it on the trunk of a car before walking away to “have a conversation with other officers about the incident,” the letter says. Mills took his vest off entirely, leaving it on another car with the camera still attached, his letter says.

Martin and Haley, the first officers on the scene who dragged Nichols out of his car, didn’t turn their cameras on before the confrontation, according to their statements of charges. Smith also hadn’t activated his camera when he first arrived at the scene, his letter says.

The documents do not clarify whether Haley, Martin or Smith turned on their cameras the second time they encountered Nichols, who was confronted by officers again after he fled on foot. Martin’s letter says he “at some point” took his camera off and put it in his car.

In a sworn affidavit submitted during his disciplinary hearing, Smith explained that he called for medical help, followed his training and even tried to assist Nichols at one point.

He said that he called for medical help even before he arrived on the scene of the second encounter.

“Even though no one else requested medical assistance, because of the reported taser and chemical spray, I immediately made a radio call and indicated that medical should be sent to the area where the suspect was last seen to possibly render medical aid if the suspect was taken into custody,” he said.

CNN could not independently confirm that Smith made that call.

After arriving at the scene, according to the affidavit, Smith said he tried to help another officer take Nichols into custody but that Nichols “was violent and would not comply.”

“It is my contention that I personally utilized the training and defensive tactics” he learned as a Memphis police officer, he said. However, according to the investigative hearing summary filed by the city, Smith admitted to investigators that he hit Nichols, “with a closed first two to three times in the face.”

Bodycam and surveillance videos from the incidents show that Nichols did not appear to be violent, and instead captured multiple officers threatening Nichols with violence while he appeared to comply with their commands or was already on the ground. Smith’s bodycam footage was not among those released by the city of Memphis.

Smith suggested that at one point he attempted to help Nichols.

“I informed my fellow officers to assist me in sitting the suspect against my squad car in order for the suspect to breath [sic] better,” the affidavit reads.

In the document, Smith did not deny failing to turn on his camera soon enough and said, “I did not intentionally fail to activate my body worn camera, but the safety of the other officers and myself was paramount,” he said.

Despite his defense, Memphis police fired Smith after finding he violated policies on personal conduct, neglect of duty, duty to intervene and excessive/unnecessary force, the documents state.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of CNN’s coverage of Black History Month and its ongoing commitment to honoring unsung heroes.

CNN
 — 

As a kid, Clarice Phelps often turned to one image for inspiration.

While other seventh graders hung ’90s pop band and movie posters on their walls, Phelps put up a poster of Mae Jemison, the first Black female astronaut to launch into space.

“Mae started it all for me,” said Phelps, who in learning about Jemison realized she – a Black girl from Nashville’s Edgehill public housing – could reach for big dreams, too.

Because of her race, her gender or her family’s income, Phelps would face bias at almost every step, she said, on her way to helping make a discovery that would change how scientists chart the building blocks of the universe.

As the first Black woman to break such scientific ground, Phelps now feels a responsibility to guide kids like the one she once was, she said – even if others’ doubts about her sometimes still echo in her mind.

An “unlikely scientist,” Phelps had few scientific influences beyond a stack of home encyclopedias and “Beakman’s World” on TV, she’s said. And growing up poor with three sisters and a single mom, advanced – and expensive – schooling didn’t seem likely.

But Phelps was a smart kid with a passion for learning, she said. She was also highly determined.

Once, after a childhood music teacher sneered at her pawn shop-bought violin, Phelps devoted hours of practice to earn first chair in the orchestra, she said in a 2019 TEDx Talk. “I poured my heart and soul into that violin because I saw it as an extension of who I wanted to be,” she said.

“I took everything in my life like that violin,” she said, refusing to let others’ assumptions limit what she might achieve.

Phelps later was selected into a magnet school, where she met two teachers who, she said, were “instrumental” in nurturing her passion for science. That love for experimentation and discovery prompted her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Tennessee State University and later enlist in the US Navy’s Nuclear Power School.

Their stories aren’t widely told, but these Black women and men helped shape history

When Phelps turned her sights to radiochemistry – the study of radioactive substances – racial bias and sexism tried to get in her way, she said. While women make up half the US workforce, only 27% work in science, technology, engineering and math, often dubbed STEM, US 2019 census data shows; of those, only 2% are Black women, according to 2015 National Science Foundation stats.

“For the first 18 years of my career, I was the only Black woman in my field. When I was in the Navy, I was the only Black girl in my division. Afterwards in my lab, I was the only Black woman in the whole facility – and initially they thought I was the janitor,” she told CNN, recalling requests to grab the trash.

“It’s isolating,” said Phelps, who after also served as an engineering laboratory technician aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. “You feel like you have to represent your entire race and descend the racial stereotypes … especially in nuclear and radiochemistry.”

Then in 2010, Phelps joined an international mission to do something else unprecedented: Create Element 117.

For years, there had been a single square in the seventh row of the periodic table of elements that scientists struggled to fill. No element with the precise chemical and physical properties to fit that spot in the familiar chart ever had been found or synthesized.

It would have to have 117 protons in its core. And like other so-called “superheavy elements” that don’t exist in nature, it would have to be created in a lab.

Work like this, Phelps explained, aims eventually to find a superheavy element stable enough to provide “new avenues for fuel and energy sources” and offer insight into the beginnings of the universe and the matter that existed during the Big Bang.

As part of the discovery team, Phelps purified the element berkelium to create a film – a painstaking, monthslong process. Then, collaborators in Germany and Russia “relentlessly bombarded” it for months with calcium.

The experiment produced six unique atoms, each with the required 117 protons. It was declared a success in 2012, and four years later, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry – the world authority on chemistry – officially recognized Element 117 as part of the periodic table, along with three other new elements.

Since Phelps’ team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other institutions in Tennessee laid the groundwork for discovery, Element 117 was officially named “tennessine” (Ts). It’s the second-heaviest known element on Earth, and though its use is limited to research, scientists believe it is a critical stepping stone toward the creation of future superheavy elements.

“We can’t imagine where tennessine could take us,” said author of “Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table” Kit Chapman, noting human-generated elements are used “in smoke detectors, to treat cancers, even to power rovers on Mars.”

With the discovery, the girl with the Jemison poster on her wall had “claimed a seat at the periodic table,” Phelps said in her TEDx Talk.

But despite the feat, Phelps again found herself fighting for recognition.

When her lab celebrated tennessine, Phelps was left off the gala’s guest list; when her supervisor got her in, no place card bore her name, she said. Even the plaque listing scientists involved in the discovery omitted her.

“They had left me off this whole thing,” Phelps said. “I felt embarrassed because everyone is wandering around this luncheon, and I literally didn’t have a seat at the table. I went outside, and I was crying.”

Phelps later was told her name had been cut off by mistake following a spreadsheets’ line break, she said.

Phelps’ “name was inadvertently omitted from a plaque dedicated to (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) staff credited with the discovery of tennessine, an error we quickly corrected,” the institution told CNN. The lab “is incredibly proud of Clarice Phelps – a US Navy veteran, a prolific scientist, an active member of the East Tennessee community.

“As the first Black woman to be involved in the discovery of an element, she is an inspiration for the next generation of women and people of color in STEM,” it said.

At the time, though, the incident – like the doubting orchestra teacher – served again to harden Phelps’ resolve.

After winning the monthslong battle to get the plaque recommissioned with her name on it, Phelps started talking with reporters about the significance of tennessine and her role on the team. And she was acknowledged by Chapman, a science historian, and British physicist Jess Wade, who has written over a thousand Wikipedia biographies about women and minority scientists, as the first Black woman involved in the discovery of a new element.

Phelps, now a mom of three, said she wants to be a visible role model, like Jemison: “I want to be that person for that little girl who’s looking for somebody that looks like them, doing things that people say they can’t do.”

Still, though, she battles imposter syndrome – the result of years of professional micro- and macro-aggressions – and tries to fight it by remembering: “I did that work,” she said.

“My hands were in the glove box handling that material,” said Phelps, who’s working to finish her PhD in nuclear engineering. “I didn’t do that by myself, there was a team, but I know what I did, and no one can take that from me.”

That’s the lesson she tries to impart as a board member and vice president of Yo-STEM, a non-profit that aims to bring STEM education to underserved communities like the one she grew up in.

“No one can take away what you know,” she said: “your experience and knowledge and your self-worth.”