I can't say I've ever even heard of Coryell except as a Texas county. Ah well.
_________________
Russian diplomat and UN ambassador
Vitaly Ivanovich ChurkinFebruary 20, in his New York office,
at 64, on the eve of his 65th birthday
This entire case is astonishing and appalling to me. The NY Times says that 'a police official said Mr. Churkin had a history of medical problems, including leukemia and heart ailments. He had kept them private among his diplomatic colleagues.' And further: 'Mr. Churkin had been unusually absent during several Security Council meetings recently, but this month he brushed off reporters’ questions about his health.' Hmm.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, says, 'On 21 February 2017 the New York City Medical Examiner's Office released the preliminary results of an autopsy peformed on Churkin, which states that the cause of death needed further study[,] which often indicates the need for toxicology tests[19].'
Coming so soon after the shameless assassination of Kim Jong-nam, not to mention the Russian history of suspicious deaths such as Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky, Natalia Estemirova, Alexander Litvinenko, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Paul Klebnikov, Sergei Yushenkov, Boris Berezovsky, Boris Nemtsov, etc., etc., it's hard not to think that there might have been political reasons.
It's also hard not to have questions about someone who was not necessarily a full-throated supporter of Putin. E.g., (from the NYT obit),
'Tom Brokaw of NBC News, who had known Mr. Churkin for many years, recalled that at a lunch at his home in 2015, the ambassador described Mr. Putin’s administration as “a kleptocracy.”
' “He was privately very critical of Putin and how he was running the country,” Mr. Brokaw said on Monday. “He was equally critical of the Obama administration. He said: ‘They just don’t get us. They’re not dealing with us the right way.’ " '
There were aspects of his views that could not be explained away, like his uncritical support for Bashir Al-Assad in Syria.
But still, there were others that made me wonder what he could have been in another life.
'a former child actor who had starred in three films ...'
'Mr. Churkin had been trained as a translator, and as an ambassador, he sometimes became visibly annoyed with United Nations interpreters who could not keep up with his rat-a-tat speaking style.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Churkinhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/euro...It's also sobering to think what oligarch or kleptocrat may be appointed to the job in his absence.
R.I.P., f.w.i.w.
