Dozens of homeless people have died in an Eastern Europe cold snap, and some analysts blame a Soviet-era legacy of viewing the homeless as those who need to be punished instead of helped.
Temperatures have plunged to minus 27°C in some areas. At least 71 people have died overall in the past week, while hundreds have sought medical help for hypothermia and frostbite. Snow and ice have disrupted traffic and power in some parts.
Ukraine has been among the hardest-hit countries. As many as 43 people have died on its snow-covered streets, in hospitals and in their own homes in the past four days, authorities said yesterday.
They said most of the victims were homeless, and that some victims had been drinking and unaware of the danger.
In one village in the Cherkasy region in central Ukraine, a 44-year-old alcoholic fell asleep on the porch of her house and froze to death, said Olena Didyuk, spokeswoman for the Emergency Situations Ministry.
Ukrainian authorities have set more than 1,730 heating shelters across the country — large green or beige tents — in which the homeless can get warm and are offered sandwiches, boiled potatoes, pork fat (a traditional Ukrainian dish), hot tea and coffee.
Still, more than 540 people have been hospitalized with hypothermia and frostbite, Ukrainian health officials said. Ukraine’s 1+1 channel broadcast footage of a man being treated for frostbite on his toes, which had turned completely black.
“I drank and fell asleep on the bench. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t feel my feet,” the unidentified man said from a hospital bed.
Hospitals were instructed to refrain from discharging homeless patients even if treatment was finished to save them from the cold, said Svitlana Tikhonenko, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian Health Ministry.
Those measures helped save some lives, she said. Two years ago, 47 people perished over a similar time period during a cold wave.
“Unfortunately, people continue to die, but we are taking all the measures to prevent them,” Tikhonenko said.
Some experts suggested that the high death toll from the cold is linked to authorities’ unwillingness and incompetence in dealing with the homeless.
Pavlo Rozenko, an expert on social policy with the Kiev-based Razumkov Center, said that Ukrainian authorities suffer from the Soviet legacy of viewing the homeless as alcoholics, drug addicts and do-nothings who need to be punished and locked away from society instead of helped.
“The country doesn’t know yet how to take care of its homeless,” Rozenko said.
Kiev municipal head Oleksandr Popov ordered city schools and colleges closed starting on Wednesday as temperatures are expected to drop to minus 28°C.
“They will be on a break at least until Monday,” Popov said on his Web site.
In Poland, five people died of hypothermia in the last 24 hours, bringing the death toll from the cold to 15 in the last four days, the national police said.
Temperatures sank on Tuesday to minus 27°C in the southeastern Polish city of Ustrzyki Gorne — and forecasts predicted minus 29°C in the region overnight.
In Romania, two people died in the past 24 hours because of the frigid weather, the health ministry said on Tuesday, bringing the total to eight since the cold spell began last week. Temperatures plunged to minus 20°C overnight in Bucharest.
In Russia, one person died of the cold in Moscow, where temperatures fell to minus 21°C, the city’s health department said. The Russian Emergencies Ministry is not reporting deaths across the country yet.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of