Two Canada Post workers in Regina were temporarily suspended earlier this month after they refused to deliver the latest sample edition of the Epoch Times.
The head of the local CUPW union that represents postal workers said both mail carriers were escorted from the building when they informed their supervisors they were unwilling to deliver the publication. They were suspended without pay for three days.
According to its sample issue, the Epoch Times was created to “bring honest and uncensored news to people oppressed by deception and tyranny in communist China.”
The paper sells subscriptions in dozens of countries and makes some content available free on its website, which, according to the paper, gets about 5.7 million readers per month in Canada. It occasionally mails out free, unsolicited sample editions through Canada Post as advertising mail.
The paper was founded in the U.S. in 2000 by Chinese-American followers of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, who have been persecuted by the Chinese government. In the past, it has broken stories about human rights abuses in China.
Epoch Times content runs the gamut from articles about health and wellness to science, politics and technology. But its main focus has been news and current affairs stories that are critical of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
A copy of the sample edition sent out in January in several Canadian cities. (Submitted)
In recent years, it has expanded its coverage of U.S. politics and gained traction among some supporters of former U.S. president Donald Trump by covering topics such as Spygate, the QAnon conspiracy theory and unfounded allegations of election fraud.
On its site, the paper describes itself as non-partisan and “independent of any influence from corporations, governments or political parties.”
In its sample issue, the Epoch Times says it has a “reputation for independent, fact-based traditional journalism” and its goal is “to serve the public benefit and be truly responsible to society.”
‘I’m not for censorship’
Ramiro Sepulveda, one of the suspended postal workers, told CBC News he objects to the insinuations in some of the paper’s past coverage of the origins of the coronavirus, which the paper calls “the CCP virus.”
“I’m not for censorship. I’m not against freedom of speech,” he said. “What my thing is, is there is no disclaimer stating that this was theory.”
He says he went straight to his supervisor when he saw the free editions that were set to be delivered earlier this month.
“I said, ‘That Epoch Times, I’m not delivering it. It goes against everything I believe in.'”
Regina mail carrier Linying Su refused to deliver the Epoch Times because she said she was concerned its coverage of the Chinese government and the coronavirus could add to anti-Asian sentiment. (Jin Liu)
The second worker, Linying Su, who was born in China, said she felt uncomfortable delivering the paper because she feared its coverage of the Chinese government could contribute to anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment in Canada and misconceptions around the origins of the coronavirus.
“This is not just about Chinese Candians; it’s about all Asian Canadians,” she told CBC News in a conversation through Facebook. “The unjustified discrimination against Chinese Canadians would turn to discrimination against all Asian Canadians….
“I may not be able to stop other people from delivering these papers, but I can stop myself from doing things that betray my own belief.”
Readers can judge for themselves, says publisher
In an email to CBC News that was also posted on the paper’s website, the publisher of the Canadian edition of the Epoch Times, Cindy Gu, said sending out free copies is a “common practice in the news industry to grow business.”
“Canada is a country that believes in freedom of the press, and we believe readers are wise enough to judge for themselves whether we are reporting truthfully,” Gu said. “This is a free country. Readers deserve the chance to know different styles and types of reporting.”
Gu said the majority of feedback to the recent edition has been positive.
“If people do not wish to read our sample newspaper, then treat it like other promotional material,” she said.
“If the delivery of mail is up to the individual carrier to decide based on his/her impression of ‘hatred,’ no one can trust the post office any more. If Canada Post were to block us, that would be the government censoring an independent media outlet. This would violate the Charter of Rights, which guarantees freedom of the press.”
The Epoch Times sells print and digital subscriptions in dozens of countries and occasionally mails out free sample editions as advertising mail through Canada Post. (Pauline Dantas)
Gu said the fears that some of the paper’s content could be misconstrued as anti-Asian are unjustified.
“We are a media started by Asian immigrants. There is no way we would publish content that is anti-Asian,” she said.
“In reporting the facts, we may contradict some commonly accepted narratives, including about China. Reading us can be a liberating experience.”
Other postal workers have objected to delivery
The Regina workers aren’t the first postal workers to complain about the publication. In April 2020, some mail carriers in the Greater Toronto Area objected to having to deliver it, and their union local filed a request with the federal government asking for an interim order to stop delivery of the newspaper. That request was denied.
The national branch of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers says it is currently in discussions with Canada Post about this matter.
Canada Post said letter carriers are obligated to deliver any mail that is “properly prepared and paid for.”
The union agrees, but William Johnson, president of the CUPW local in Regina, said there needs to be a better solution than suspension for workers who are uncomfortable delivering the publication.
The government has said the paper’s content does not meet the criteria of ‘non-mailable matter,’ and Canada Post and its employee union both agree that the postal service cannot refuse to deliver mail that has been ‘prepared and paid for.’ (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
“What I don’t want to see is this happening. If this is going to be a publication that comes out every month — that we go through this process every month. That’s not good for morale,” Johnson said. “It’s a really stressful time for the employees. And so I think there has to be some sort of alternative as to how we deal with this situation.”
Canada Post said in an emailed statement to CBC News that it understands “this is a difficult situation.”
“The courts have told Canada Post that its role is not to act as the censor of mail or to determine the extent of freedom of expression in Canada,” it said. “This is an important distinction between Canada Post and private sector delivery companies.”
Doesn’t fit criteria of non-mailable matter
To refuse delivery, material would have to meet Canada Post’s definition of “non-mailable matter,” which includes items that are prohibited by law, such as illegal, obscene and fraudulent items.
Those who want to opt out of receiving the Epoch Times sample editions must opt out of all ad mail, including grocery and community-based flyers and other promotional material.
A spokesperson for Anita Anand, the minister in charge of Canada Post, said the minister “is actively reviewing the rules relating to the circulation of the Epoch Times.”
One Ontario resident who wrote to her local MP to complain about the free edition after it turned up in her mailbox in Mississauga earlier this month said she supports such a review.
Mississauga, Ont., resident Pauline Dantas wrote to her local MP to complain about the unsolicited edition of the paper she received this month. (Tina Mackenzie/CBC News)
“I think it’s important for politicians to really take a look at this and just say, ‘Is this what we want a Crown corporation to be delivering?” said Pauline Dantas.
Dantas was told by the outreach co-ordinator for Gagan Sikand, the Liberal MP for Mississauga-Streetsville, that the content of Epoch Times does not meet the criteria of non-mailable matter.
“Anyone concerned with the contents of the Epoch Times can contact the publisher directly, file a complaint through the appropriate institutions or place the item in the recycling box,” Sarah Hleyhel wrote in an email to Dantas.
‘A pretty decent view on what’s going on’
Tony Phillips, a retiree in Debert, N.S., skimmed the special edition when it arrived in his mailbox.
He thinks calls to ban delivery of the paper through Canada Post are “nanny state-ish.”
Phillips said while he doesn’t agree with all the views expressed in the paper, he’s interested in hearing them.
Tony Phillips of Debert, N.S., said he didn’t mind getting the free edition of the Epoch Times and appreciated reading opinions that might differ from his own. (Annie Phillips)
“I’m kind of interested in seeing what people think,” Phillips said. “I just find it, kind of, part of the human zoo, and I just, kind of, enjoy it.”
“I just like to get an idea of the social landscape in a sense … I think there’s a danger that you can just listen to yourself or people who think the same way as you do.”
He said he wasn’t bothered by getting an unsolicited copy of the paper any more than he would be to get a community flyer or pamphlet that might turn up at one’s door.
“It didn’t loom large, really. It was just interesting, an interesting blip,” he said.
Candice, a southwestern Ontario mother of four who asked that her last name be withheld because of fears of being harassed for her views, said she liked the paper so much she subscribed to it two months ago.
“This newspaper gives a pretty decent view on what’s going on,” she said. “They’re obviously not shying away from the fact they are anti-communist, and some people don’t like that. Some people think that they’re out to lunch. But I’m not one of those people.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in September. Epoch Times coverage has been critical of the Chinese government’s handling of the coronavirus, which the paper refers to as the ‘CCP virus’ in reference to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. (Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press)
Candice said she doesn’t think the paper stokes racist sentiments and likes the variety of the content.
“I see it as being hard to get diverse thoughts, especially when now, the catch phrases of misinformation, disinformation get thrown around over a multitude of topics,” she said. “I’d rather know more about what’s going on rather than hiding from it.”
She is able to find coverage she can’t find elsewhere, she said, such as stories about positive changes made by the Trump administration.
“Mainstream media would be more like, ‘We hate Trump, so we’re going to … write about that,'” she said. “I don’t hate Trump.”
Trump rhetoric on China helped raised profile
Sonya Fatah, an assistant professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, says she thinks most people who encounter the publication in Canada will realize it’s not a typical newspaper.
“It’s quite obvious that it’s very much focused on a specific mission, which is to bring down the CCP (Chinese Communist Party),” she said.
“What is interesting is that people are reacting to it very strongly. And I think the reaction is giving more space to the Epoch Times than perhaps we need to.”
Fatah said the paper’s profile has increased in the last four years, in part because its own stated goals were aligned with some of Donald Trump’s rhetoric on China.
“It’s been a little surprising, I think, for a lot of people who’ve kind of seen it as a fringe player,” Fatah said.
“Trump was, in a way, an excellent mouthpiece for the cause. He was out there calling the virus a ‘Chinese flu,’ the ‘Chinese virus.'”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
