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'Hell Amid Olive Trees,' Deadly Italy Train Crash Coverage

L'Unità, July 13

"Hell amid the olive trees," reads Wednesday's front page of Italian daily L'Unità, describing the head-on train crash near the southern city of Bari that killed at least 27 people and injured 50.

Two local passenger trains traveling in opposite directions on a single-track railway collided at around 11:30 am Tuesday near the town of Corato, in the southern Italian region of Puglia. The crash occurred in an olive grove in the countryside near the city of Bari, and early investigations point towards human error as the cause, although technical failures haven't been ruled out. Emergency workers continued to comb through the ruins of the crash early Wednesday.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi traveled to the crash site by helicopter late Tuesday, and announced an immediate investigation to identify the cause of the crash. "We won't stop until we clarify what happened," Renzi told journalists.

While most of the railways in Italy's network have automatic brake systems, the track where the crash occurred is a privately owned local railway where work to install an automatic system was yet to begin.

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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