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‘Thankless job’ – why trainee Kenyan doctors are taking their own lives
A sombre mood engulfed a village in Kenya’s Rift Valley last week as dozens of medical interns joined other mourners at the burial of their colleague who had taken his own life.
Speaker after speaker lamented the loss of Francis Njuki, a 29-year-old trainee pharmacist, whose family told the BBC about his feelings of exhaustion and frustration over the non-payment of his salary by the government since he started working as an intern in August.
He is the fifth medic to kill themselves in Kenya in the last two months because of “work-stress hardships and lack of responsive insurance cover”, according to Dr Davji Atellah, the secretary of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU) – adding it was not something the union had ever recorded before.
There had also been five attempted suicides by KMPDU members this year, the medical body said.
No figures are yet available on the number of suicides nationwide in Kenya this year.
Njuki was doing his internship at a public hospital in Thika town near the capital, Nairobi, when he took his life last month.
He had reported hallucinations and depression due to sleep deprivation, his uncle Tirus Njuki told BBC.
“In his suicide note he mentioned that the four-month salary delay was among issues that aggravated his mental illness, pushing him to end his life,” the uncle added.
The first-born in his family, the intern had been battling depression and had been receiving treatment, according to a police report.
Njuki was among hundreds of interns who were posted to health facilities in August to do their mandatory one-year training to qualify.
But the interns say they had not received their salaries for the first four months, with the government citing financial constraints.
This is despite the fact that interns are a crucial part of the workforce in public hospitals – used by many Kenyans who cannot afford private medical insurance.
Trainees make up about 30% of doctors in the state health sector.
They do most of the work in public hospitals, but under close supervision. They are on call, sometimes for 36 hours, and provide most of the health services that patients need.
“Like many of his colleagues, Dr Njuki faced insurmountable challenges in meeting basic needs such as rent and utility bills,” KMPDU said in a statement.
International
FTX executives shave serious time off their sentences
Ryan Salame and Caroline Ellison, FTX executives convicted for their roles in the notorious crypto fraud led by their former boss Sam Bankman-Fried, have both shaved time off their lengthy prison sentences.
Salame, a former top executive of FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency trading platform, pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges in September 2023, and was sentenced in May to 7 1/2 years in federal prison. He began his sentence in October. But the Federal Bureau of Prisons currently lists his release date as March 1, 2031, more than a year earlier than his initial release date in April 2032. Business Insider first reported Salame’s new release date.
Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and the former CEO of FTX’s hedge fund arm, Alameda Research, was sentenced to 2 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to seven federal counts of fraud and conspiracy and was a key witness against Bankman-Fried. Her current release date is listed as July 20, 2025, three months earlier than her initial release date.
Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison, does not have a release date listed on the prisons website.
The Bureau of Prisons didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. However, in several past statements about early release dates, the bureau has told CNN that it does not comment on the conditions of any individual inmate, but inmates can earn good conduct time that is calculated into their projected release date.
Qualified inmates are currently eligible for up to 54 days of GCT time for each year of the sentence imposed by the court. Inmates have other ways of earning time credits while incarcerated, including participation in various prison programs.
FTX was a high-profile crypto startup that allowed people to buy and sell digital assets. It had its name emblazoned on an arena in Miami and on every Major League Baseball umpire’s jersey. The exchange had several celebrity endorsers and was widely believed to be a gold-standard for safety and security.
But FTX collapsed in November 2022 when customers pulled their funds as rumors spread about FTX’s unusually close ties to its founder’s crypto hedge fund, Alameda
International
‘It’s a scary time’: US universities urge international students to return to campus before Trump inauguration
Fear and uncertainty are spreading across many US college campuses ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, with some schools advising international students to return early from winter break amid promises of another travel ban like the one that stranded students abroad at the start of Trump’s last term.
In a country where more than 1.1 million international students enrolled in US colleges and universities during the 2023-24 academic year, the former president has pledged more hardline immigration policies upon his return to the White House, including an expansion of his previous travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and the revocation of student visas of “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”
International students generally have nonimmigrant visas that allow them to study in the US but don’t provide a legal pathway to stay in the country.
International
Questions swirl over deadly crash of Azerbaijan Airlines plane. Here’s what we know
Azerbaijan held a day of mourning on Thursday for the dozens of victims of an airliner crash in Kazakhstan, as questions were being asked over the cause of the disaster.
The reasons that Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 came down are still unknown. Reuters reported Thursday that the plane was downed by a Russian air defense system, citing multiple unnamed sources in Azerbaijan with knowledge of the investigation.
Officials from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, three countries linked to the disaster, urged people not to speculate about the crash until investigations have concluded.
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