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Russia

Top Kremlin Foe Dies Of AIDS After Prison Ordeal, Raising Human Rights Questions

Vasily Aleksanyan is dead at 38. He used to be a lawyer and top executive of oil company Yukos, whose chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky is in jail since 2003. Aleksanyan had long battled with Russian authorities to be released from jail to be treated for AIDS.

File image shows Aleksanyan before a court appearance (Canvas TV)
File image shows Aleksanyan before a court appearance (Canvas TV)

Worldcrunch *NEWSBITES

MOSCOW - Vasily Aleksanyan, a former jailed executive of oil company Yukos, had long battled with Russian authorities to be released from jail to be able to get AIDS treatment. Now, at the age of 38, Aleksanyan has died at his Moscow home.

The former oil executive, who had full-blown AIDS, lymphoma and tuberculosis, was arrested in April 2006 on charges of embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion. Similar charges had landed his boss, the billionaire Yukos chief-turned-dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in jail, where he has remain confined since 2003.

The European Court of Human Rights had urged three times that Aleksanyan be hospitalized, saying the Russian authorities "had not shown the necessary care, which caused him severe suffering." Nevertheless, he was kept in jail.

Aleksanyan was finally released on bail of $1.8 million in December 2008 when the statute of limitations expired on his case. Aleksanyan had been Yukos' top lawyer but quit the company after Khodorkovsky's arrest in 2003.

He returned in March 2006 as an executive vice-president to work on the company's bankruptcy proceedings before being arrested the following month.

Later that year, he learned he was HIV-positive and his lawyers said the authorities used his illness as a means to force him to testify against Khodorkovsky. He was allowed to leave the country and received treatment in Israel, but its benefits were short-lived. His lawyer, Yuri Shmidt, who also represents Khodorkovsky told Kommersant "I spoke with (him) three days ago, and Vasily's condition was very serious."

Human rights activists compare the case to that of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who was arrested while investigating alleged fraud by government officials, and later died in prison.

"We were hoping until the last moment that the news of his death was not true," another Yukos lawyer said.

Read the full article in Russian by Nicolai Sergeyev

photo - Canvas TV

*Newsbites are digest items, not direct translations

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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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