Author: News Polite

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Their bodies were found on public benches, lying next to bike paths, crumpled under freeway overpasses and stranded on the sun-drenched beach. Across Los Angeles County last year, the unsheltered died in record numbers, an average of five homeless deaths a day, most in plain view of the world around them.

Two hundred eighty-seven homeless people took their last breath on the sidewalk, 24 died in alleys and 72 were found on the pavement, according to data from the county coroner. They were a small fraction of the thousands of homeless people across the country who die each year.

“It’s like a wartime death toll in places where there is no war,” said Maria Raven, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco who co-wrote a study about homeless deaths.

An epidemic of deaths on the streets of American cities has accelerated as the homeless population has aged and the cumulative toll of living and sleeping outdoors has shortened lives. The wider availability of fentanyl, a particularly fast-acting and dangerous drug, has been a major cause of the rising death toll, but many homeless people are dying young of treatable chronic illnesses like heart disease.

More than ever it has become deadly to be homeless in America, especially for men in their 50s and 60s, who typically make up the largest cohort of despair. In many cities the number of homeless deaths doubled during the pandemic, a time when seeking medical care became more difficult, housing costs continued to rise and when public health authorities were preoccupied with combating the coronavirus.

Austin, Denver, Indianapolis, Nashville and Salt Lake City are among the cities where officials and homeless advocates have said they have been alarmed by the rising number of deaths.

But the crisis is most acute in California, where about one in four of the nation’s 500,000 homeless people lives.

The process of tallying homeless deaths is painstaking, involving the cross-referencing of homeless databases and death reports. But based on data from the handful of California’s 58 counties that report homeless deaths, experts said that 4,800 is a conservative estimate for last year.

In Los Angeles County, the homeless population grew by 50 percent from 2015 to 2020. Homeless deaths have grown at a far faster rate, an increase of about 200 percent during the same period to nearly 2,000 deaths in the county last year.

“These are profoundly lonely deaths,” said David Modersbach, who led the first public study of homeless deaths in Alameda County across the Bay from San Francisco.

In some cases, bodies are left undiscovered for hours. Others are unclaimed at the morgue despite efforts to reach family members. In San Francisco, where people sleeping in cardboard boxes, tents and other makeshift shelters are a common sight, the body of a homeless man who died on a traffic median last spring lay for more than 12 hours before being retrieved. “Guy lay dead here & no one noticed,” said a cardboard sign left at the scene.

Those who sleep on the streets speak of the wear that it imposes on the body, of several untreated illnesses and the loneliness of being surrounded by pedestrians who ignore you.

Billy, a metal worker and carpenter from New Jersey who now sleeps in the narrow alleys behind Venice Beach in Los Angeles, constantly feels the reminders of his previous jobs. At 50 he has chronic pain from an accident while trimming trees, treating it with a jumbo-size bottle of Aleve he keeps in his backpack.

He has overdosed twice from heroin, revived both times with the drug naloxone, and has watched as friends have disappeared around him.

“I can name 30 or 40 people who have died of overdoses and most of them were in my demographic,” said Billy, who did not want his last name published because he said it would embarrass his three grown children.

A study by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health found that homeless people are 35 times as likely as the general population to die of a drug or alcohol overdose. They are also four times as likely to die of heart disease, 16 times as likely to die in a car crash, 14 times as likely to be murdered and eight times as likely to die of suicide.

California, flush with cash from pandemic budget surpluses, has poured record amounts of money into combating homelessness. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a $12 billion homelessness package last year that included funds to construct 42,000 new housing units.

Los Angeles County voted overwhelmingly in 2017 to raise its sales tax and generate a projected $3.5 billion over 10 years for homelessness programs. Since then the county has housed 78,000 people.

Yet, county officials say they cannot keep up: While 207 homeless people find housing every day, 227 people become homeless daily, the county calculates.

And once on the street, mental health, drug abuse and general medical well-being can spiral out of control. Mr. Modersbach said he had been struck by how many homeless people were dying of diseases outside of hospitals or other clinical settings.

“To die of heart disease, liver disease, respiratory diseases — on your own — is pretty shocking,” he said.

Of the 809 homeless deaths from 2018 to 2020 in Alameda County, according to the study, one-quarter were from drug overdoses, half were from heart attacks, cancer, strokes and chronic illnesses, and the rest were from accidents, suicides and homicides. In Sacramento County at least three homeless people froze to death last year.

A key distinction among the homeless population today is the graying of the destitute.

Margot Kushel, a doctor specializing in homeless care, has tracked the rise of the average age of homeless people in the San Francisco Bay Area from their mid-30s three decades ago to their mid-50s today.

But even that rise in age does not tell the full story of their vulnerability, she said. Homeless people in their 50s are showing geriatric symptoms: difficulty dressing and bathing, visual and hearing problems, urinary incontinence.

“Poverty is very wearing on the body,” Dr. Kushel said. “Fifty is the new 75.”

A quarter of the homeless people she began studying nine years ago are now dead. The median age of death was 63, well below the average U.S. life expectancy of 77.

Across California, homeless deaths are overwhelmingly among men, and especially Black men who are dying on the streets at rates far disproportionate to their share of the general population. In Los Angeles County, men make up 67 percent of the homeless population but 83 percent of homeless deaths. In San Francisco, men in their 50s have the highest rates of overdose deaths among all age deciles.

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychologist, said the issue of death and despair among older men was underappreciated and understudied. He said society should ask the question: “Can we help men from dying so much?”

David Brown, 59, a former bus driver and fast-food employee in San Francisco who is currently enrolled in a rehabilitation program at the Salvation Army, describes the circumstances that put him on the streets as a life’s accumulation of woes. The knee problems from cramming his tall frame into the bus driver’s seat. The type 2 diabetes. The prison terms he served for burglary. A lifetime struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse.

So many friends died in shootings around the time of the crack epidemic in the 1980s and from overdoses on the streets that he feels entirely bereft.

“I don’t have anybody in my life,” he said.

Pamela Prickett, a sociologist who has studied death records in Los Angeles, said one measure of male isolation is that men’s bodies go unclaimed at the morgue at twice the rate of women. The rates that bodies go unclaimed, which have been climbing since the 1970s, are highest among men in their 40s and 50s.

“There are more people not getting married or getting divorced and not getting remarried,” Ms. Prickett said. “So we find lots of loners.”

Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, said he had seen a pattern of men being ill-equipped to handle “triggers” in life such as illness and losing a job or a spouse.

“As men get older they tend to be less good at building and maintaining relationships,” he said. “When people do not have a safety net to catch them in the form of community and strong healthy relationships, it’s much more likely they end up struggling with substance use disorders, with mental illness and homelessness.”

Ivan Perez, 53, is philosophical about what caused his life to go off the rails. His wife’s miscarriage and their marriage that fell apart. A marijuana habit that sank his career as a stockbroker. Prison time for an assault when he was high. Gambling.

“Being alone you kind of have no excuses to say it’s my wife’s fault, it’s my mom’s fault, it’s society’s fault,” Mr. Perez said.

In recent months he has slept on the streets in a tent near the North Hollywood subway station. The soundtrack to his life, he said, is the hissing of passing trucks next to his tent and the swoosh of street cleaners.

“There’s a certain posture that you take when you are homeless,” he said. “You lose your dignity.”

His goal, he said, was to live as long as his father, who died at 54 and a half. He is not far off.

Mr. Perez remembered the hopes he had when he was younger of becoming an actor or a playwright.

“I tried to do all the right things and it blew up in my face,” he said.

“What a raw deal this life turned out to be.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

The American conductor Gavriel Heine has been a fixture at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, for 15 years. He has led hundreds of performances of classics like “Swan Lake” and “The Rite of Spring.” And he has done so as a protégé of the company’s leader: Valery Gergiev.

On Saturday, Mr. Heine went yet again to the Mariinsky, but not for an evening at the podium. He was there to inform Mr. Gergiev — a longtime friend and supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that he was resigning from his post as one of the state-run theater’s resident conductors. Mr. Heine gathered his possessions, including a few white bow ties and scores for “La Bohème” and “The Turn of the Screw,” and prepared to leave the country.

Mr. Heine, 47, had been increasingly disturbed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s no way I could ever be in denial of what is happening in Ukraine,” he said during a series of interviews over the past week. “Russia is not a place where I want to raise my son. It’s not a place where I want my wife to be anymore. It’s not a place I want to be anymore.”

His resignation comes as the war continues to upend performing arts. Cultural institutions in Europe and North America, vowing not to hire performers who support Mr. Putin, have severed ties with some artists — most notably Mr. Gergiev — as well as orchestras, theaters and ballet companies. Many artists, citing the invasion, have canceled appearances in Russia.

Mr. Gergiev, the theater’s general and artistic director, was once one of the world’s busiest conductors, but his international career has crumbled. Carnegie Hall, for example, canceled a pair of concerts of the Mariinsky Orchestra under his baton that had been planned for May, after he had been dropped from a series of Vienna Philharmonic performances in February. He has returned in recent weeks to St. Petersburg to focus on that company and his domestic cultural empire, which encompasses several stages, thousands of employees and tens of millions of dollars in state financing.

Mr. Heine found Mr. Gergiev at the Mariinsky on Saturday, where he was leading rehearsals and performances of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” and Verdi’s “Attila.” He described repeatedly trying to catch his mentor backstage to inform him of his resignation, finally cornering him in an elevator.

It was a quick conversation: five minutes while Mr. Gergiev was rushing to a meeting. Mr. Heine said that Mr. Gergiev seemed surprised but accepted his decision.

“He was very nice to me,” Mr. Heine said. “He gave me a handshake and a hug and wished me well. And of course I thanked him for giving me such a huge chance pretty early in my career.”

The two conductors also spoke about recent tensions between Russia and the West. Mr. Gergiev — who was fired from engagements in the United States and Europe, as well as from the podium of the Munich Philharmonic, over his refusal to publicly condemn the war — defended his decision, saying that he was not a child, Mr. Heine recalled.

The Mariinsky declined to comment on Monday, and said it could not yet confirm Mr. Heine’s resignation. However, the company removed Mr. Heine’s biography from its website Monday evening.

Mr. Heine’s departure from the Mariinsky is an unexpected conclusion to his three-decade career in Russia, where he studied with renowned teachers and rose to become a conductor at one of the country’s most prestigious houses. And his exit is another blow to Russian cultural institutions, which are grappling with boycotts and cancellations by foreign groups as the country’s arts increasingly turn inward under Mr. Putin. Mr. Gergiev remains a critical figure in Mr. Putin’s campaign. Mr. Putin, during a televised meeting last month, asked Mr. Gergiev whether he was interested in the idea of uniting the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with the Mariinsky, an arrangement that would take Russia back to the days of the czars.

“Russia is just going to be more and more closed,” said Simon Morrison, a music professor at Princeton University. “It’s going to revert more and more to its own true self, harsh as that might seem — a sealed-off, angry, paranoid and resentful feudal realm.”

Mr. Heine, who grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., became interested in Russian culture as a teenager. He accompanied his mother, a pianist, to a performance in Moscow, and while there took cello lessons with a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

After high school, he returned to Russia for language and cultural studies. In 1998, he became one of the Moscow Conservatory’s first American graduates, then began to study with the eminent Russian conductor Ilya Musin, who also taught Mr. Gergiev.

His break came in 2007, when Mr. Heine approached Mr. Gergiev during a rehearsal in Philadelphia and asked him whether the Mariinsky had any openings. Mr. Heine was invited to make his debut at the theater later that year with Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and soon began to lead performances there regularly. In 2009, he was named a resident conductor.

During his time at the Mariinsky, Mr. Heine was at the podium for over 850 performances and watched as the company grew in power and size under Mr. Gergiev. The arts and the state, Mr. Heine said he came to understand, were inexorably linked in Russia. He was in the theater on two occasions when Mr. Putin, the house’s main benefactor, appeared for awards ceremonies and other events.

“I just assumed that culture is a priority for this government, for whatever reason,” he said. “And they feel very strongly about it, and that’s the relationship.”

He recognized that Mr. Gergiev sometimes used art for political purposes, such as when he led a patriotic concert in the Syrian city of Palmyra in 2016, shortly after Russian airstrikes helped drive the Islamic State out of the city.

Still, Mr. Heine said, he was not bothered by Mr. Gergiev’s long association with Mr. Putin. The two have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure at the Mariinsky, which was then called the Kirov Theater.

“I never felt that we were at the service of the state,” Mr. Heine said. “It just seemed like the state trusted Gergiev for his artistic priorities, and he convinced them that his priorities were good priorities, and they funded that.”

The invasion of Ukraine changed his views on Russia and his place in it. He had a personal connection to Ukraine, having served as chief conductor of the Kharkiv Symphony Orchestra there from 2003 to 2007. When he saw images of Russian missiles hitting a building in Kharkiv in early March, he was distraught.

“That broke me,” he said. “I saw the faces of all of the musicians that I had worked with. I thought of my orchestra director who lives two blocks behind that building. I mean, that’s his neighborhood. I just lost it. I couldn’t do anything that day and I thought that was pretty much it.”

He resolved to leave his position, in part because he was worried about the safety of his wife and 11-year-old son. His family left for the United States in early March, while he went to Switzerland to lead a production of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Opéra de Lausanne.

He returned to St. Petersburg last week and spent several days packing up his apartment and saying goodbye to colleagues over meals at his favorite Italian restaurant near the Mariinsky, where a pizza is named for him. He submitted his resignation letter to the company on Sunday and returned the keys to his locker.

On Monday, he arrived in London, where he is set to lead a production of “Swan Lake” at the Royal Opera House next month.

He said it was hard for him to leave Russia, where he has spent about half of his life. He considers himself Russian from a cultural perspective, though he remains an American citizen.

Still, Mr. Heine has made his peace with moving on. “The sad part wasn’t walking into the theater; the sad part was the disappointment and the sadness of the people that I had to tell I was leaving,” he said.

“The theater’s not going anywhere,” he added. “I am.”

Hours after a federal judge struck down a nationwide mask requirement on airplanes, trains, buses and other public transportation on Monday, the country’s largest airlines said they would stop requiring masks, ending a practice that had been in place for most carriers for nearly two years.

The airlines weighed in after a Biden administration official said the Transportation Security Administration would no longer enforce the mask requirement while the White House reviewed the decision and determined whether it would appeal the ruling.

Generally, the airlines said they would no longer require masks at airports and on flights within the United States, though several said they would still require them when flying into cities and countries where requirements were still in place. Some airports may continue to require masks, too.

Here’s what each of the major national airlines had to say.

American Airlines

In a statement, American said it had “prioritized the health and safety” of its employees and customers throughout the pandemic and supported federal measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus. While it will no longer require masks at airports and on flights within the United States, the airline said customers and employees could choose to wear them “at their own discretion.”

“We are deeply grateful to our team members for their enforcement of the mandate, and will share more information about this transition in the coming days,” American said.

Southwest Airlines

Southwest said in a statement that it was encouraging employees and customers “to make the best decision to support their personal well-being” about whether to wear a mask. The airline said safety on its flights would remain an “uncompromising priority,” pointing to the high-end air filtration on the planes that it and other carriers use.

Delta Air Lines

While Delta similarly announced that it would stop enforcing a mask requirement, the airline also asked for patience as the shift in policy was rolled out.

“Given the unexpected nature of this announcement, please be aware that customers, airline employees and federal agency employees, such as T.S.A., may be receiving this information at different times,” it said. “You may experience inconsistent enforcement during the next 24 hours as this news is more broadly communicated — remember to show understanding and patience with others who may not be aware enforcement is no longer required. Communications to customers and in-airport signage and announcements will be updated to share that masking is now optional — this may take a short period of time.”

United Airlines

United said that it would stop requiring masks on domestic flights, but that they would still be required on flights into countries where a mandate was still in place.

“While this means that our employees are no longer required to wear a mask — and no longer have to enforce a mask requirement for most of the flying public — they will be able to wear masks if they choose to do so, as the C.D.C. continues to strongly recommend wearing a mask on public transit,” the airline said.

Alaska Airlines

In a statement to customers, Alaska noted the significance of the moment and said it welcomed the opportunity to “see your smiling faces,” while acknowledging that some may still feel conflicted about the shift in policy.

“It has been a long 24 months with nearly constant change,” said Max Tidwell, the airline’s vice president of safety and security. “I could not be prouder of our frontline employees who have handled every pivot focusing on safety and the care we’re known for. We’re also thankful for our guests who remained considerate, patient and stood by us throughout every twist and turn.”

JetBlue Airways

JetBlue announced its shift in a short statement, noting that “mask wearing will now be optional,” though customers and flight crews are still “welcome” to wear masks in terminals and on the airline’s planes.

Spirit Airlines

Masks are now optional on Spirit, too, the airline said late Monday.

“We understand some guests may want to continue wearing face coverings on flights, and that’s perfectly fine under our optional policy,” it said. “For our guests traveling internationally, please remember to check country-specific airport requirements before traveling.”

Frontier Airlines

Like other airlines, Frontier said it would stop requiring masks on its planes, but cautioned that they might still be required at some airports and in some municipalities.

“Customers and team members should continue to abide by mask rules within any facility that may require it,” it said. “Per C.D.C. guidance, regardless of whether a mask mandate is in effect, individuals are encouraged to continue to wear masks in indoor settings.”

A federal judge cleared the way on Monday for a group of Georgia voters to move forward with legal efforts seeking to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for re-election to Congress, citing her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The disqualification effort is based on a constitutional provision adopted after the Civil War that barred members of the Confederacy from holding office. It mirrors several other cases involving Republican members of Congress, whose roles leading up to and during the deadly riot have drawn intense criticism.

The judge, Amy Totenberg, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia by President Barack Obama, denied Ms. Greene’s request for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order in the high-profile legal feud.

Ms. Greene, 47, who is known for her unflinching loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump and for her clashes with Democrats, has steadfastly denied that she aided and engaged in the attack on the Capitol.

In the 73-page ruling, Judge Totenberg wrote that Ms. Greene had failed to meet the “burden of persuasion” in her request for injunctive relief, which she called an extraordinary and drastic remedy.

“This case involves a whirlpool of colliding constitutional interests of public import,” Judge Totenberg wrote. “The novelty of the factual and historical posture of this case — especially when assessed in the context of a preliminary injunction motion reviewed on a fast track — has made resolution of the complex legal issues at stake here particularly demanding.”

A lawyer for Ms. Greene did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday night.

In her request for an injunction, Ms. Greene argued that it would be impossible to fully resolve the case before Georgia holds its primary elections on May 24. Absentee ballots will start to be mailed on April 25, Ms. Greene’s motion said.

In the ruling, Judge Totenberg determined that Ms. Greene had failed to prove that there was a strong likelihood that she would prevail on the merits of her legal claims. A state administrative judge is scheduled to hear the case on Friday.

The decision by Judge Totenberg stood in stark contrast with a recent ruling in a similar case involving Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina. In blocking that disqualification effort, U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II, an appointee of Mr. Trump, ruled that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution narrowly applied to members of the Confederacy after the Civil War.

Ms. Greene’s critics have said that she frequently referred to efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election results as “our 1776 moment” in public comments that led up to the riot at the Capitol. They contend that the phrase was a code used to incite violence, and point to the third section of the 14th Amendment in their argument to drop her from the ballot.

That section says that “no person shall” be a member of Congress or hold civil office if they had engaged in insurrection or rebellion after “having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State.”

The constitutional challenge to Ms. Greene’s candidacy, filed last month with Georgia’s secretary of state, argued that Ms. Greene had helped to plan the attack on the Capitol or knew that a demonstration organized by Mr. Trump and his supporters on the National Mall would escalate into violence.

The group pursuing the case is represented by Free Speech for People, a nonpartisan, nonprofit legal advocacy organization with constitutional law expertise, which was also involved in the case involving Mr. Cawthorn.

Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, heralded the ruling on Monday night in an email to The New York Times.

“Judge Totenberg’s well-reasoned opinion explains why the Georgia voters who filed this challenge against Greene have the right to have their challenge heard, and why none of Greene’s objections to the Georgia state challenge have any merit,” Mr. Fein said. “At the hearing on Friday, we look forward to questioning Greene under oath about her involvement in the events of Jan. 6, and to demonstrating how her facilitation of the insurrection disqualifies her from public office under the United States Constitution.”

Last year, the House removed Ms. Greene from the Education and Budget Committees for endorsing the executions of Democrats and spreading dangerous and bigoted misinformation. The move — supported by the majority of Democrats and opposed nearly unanimously by Republicans — diminished Ms. Greene’s influence in the chamber.