Harleen Kaur’s bags are packed but she has nowhere to go.
Last December, the Canadian government told her she was approved to become a permanent resident. So she quit her job as a scientific project manager in India and prepared to move to Toronto.
She and her family booked flights for early April. But then the novel coronavirus pandemic struck. All international flights leaving India were cancelled and the travel documents she and her family were issued by Canadian immigration authorities expired on April 27.
Now, six months later, Kaur says she and her husband, along with their two young children, are stuck in India. Even though flights between the two countries resumed in May, they can’t fly to Canada because the government hasn’t renewed their travel documents.
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Coronavirus: The migrant worker crisis on Canadian farms
Canadian immigration and embassy officials also haven’t provided a clear timeline for how long it will take before these types of documents will be renewed, Kaur said, leaving her and potentially tens of thousands of other would-be immigrants feeling stranded.
“The problem is that we have been kept in the dark,” Kaur said from her home in Bangalore, India.
“I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. It’s like an endless wait.”
According to government data, more than 85,500 people immigrated to Canada from India in 2019. India is the largest source of newcomers to Canada, making up nearly a quarter of all new immigrants over the past three years.
Between April and July, the first four months after lockdowns triggered COVID-19 restrictions, the number of permanent residents arriving in Canada from all countries dropped by about 63 per cent compared to the same time period last year, according to Immigration Canada data. That’s a decrease of roughly 83,000 people.
It’s unclear how much of this drop is due to people being unable to travel due to COVID-19 restrictions, and how much is due to the government being slow to renew previously-approved residency applications.
Family losing hope
On March 18, Canada imposed travel restrictions for international flights, including prohibiting non-essential air travel for foreign nationals. But anyone whose permanent resident status was confirmed on or before this date was exempt from these rules and allowed to travel to Canada so long as they have a valid entry visa.
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Then, on March 23, India banned all international air travel, including departing flights, affecting people like Kaur and her family.
By the time international flights resumed — Air India operated at least 100 flights from New Delhi to Toronto and Vancouver between late May and the end of August — the Kaurs’ travel documents issued by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada were no longer valid.
And despite the fact that Canada has since set up an online portal for people with expired documents to get extensions, very few applicants have received the authorization they need to travel.
“We have contacted approximately 300 people so far [who completed the online process] and we are waiting on a number of them to get back to us with supporting information,” said Immigration Canada spokesperson Béatrice Fénelon.
2:36 New travel exemptions allow for cross-border family reunification
New travel exemptions allow for cross-border family reunification
Global News asked Immigration Canada how many permanent resident documents have expired since the start of the pandemic and how many have been renewed. The government did not answer either of these questions directly. It also declined to say how many people have asked for an extension of their travel documents.
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At this point, Kaur said, she and her husband have all but given up hope, putting their immediate plans to move to Canada on hold.
“It was a big blow for us,” she said. “This is the most challenging time we have faced as a family.”
Immigration Canada says it is facing unprecedented challenges due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, including the need to close visa offices around the world.
Despite these challenges, however, the government says it is processing renewal applications submitted through the online portal from confirmed permanent residents “as quickly as possible.”
The application requires submitting numerous details, including living arrangements, possible job offer, plus plans for accessing basic services, such as groceries and medical care, during the required 14-day quarantine period upon arriving in Canada.
Would-be immigrants must also have a compelling reason for coming to Canada now, such as being reunited with an immediate family member or working in the health-care sector, before their expired documents will be renewed.
But some of the instructions on Immigration Canada’s website for completing this process are misleading and have caused applicants to fork over thousands of dollars for flights they then have to cancel.
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Prashant Gupta, from Kolkata, India, says he’s completed Immigration Canada’s web form at least a dozen times trying to get his documents renewed.
According to the online instructions for the form, priority will be given to people with “proposed or confirmed” travel plans and to those willing to travel “immediately once approved.”
To boost his chances of success, Gupta booked a flight departing Aug. 25 from Delhi to Toronto and sent his confirmation to the government. But he then had to cancel the ticket because he didn’t hear back from Immigration Canada in time. The cancelled ticket, worth nearly $1,400, has not yet been refunded, he said.
“We’re looking for hope here, but we’re not getting it,” Gupta said.
Global News asked the government why it advises people that priority will be given to those with confirmed travel plans when there are no clear timelines for how long it takes to renew documents.
In an email sent Sept. 18, the government said Immigration Canada’s website would be changed to advise people not to purchase tickets until after their applications are approved. As of Oct. 7, the website remained unchanged.
“We ask that individuals provide [Immigration Canada] with a proposed travel itinerary to show that they have looked into whether they can transit through other countries while on route to Canada,” Fénelon said.
Families separated
Reetendra Desai, an IT recruiter living in Toronto, has been trying to get his wife’s expired entry visa and permanent resident documents renewed for months.
“It’s horrible. I just cannot imagine what she might be going through,” Desai said.
Desai married his wife in India after immigrating to Canada. He then sponsored her resident application so she could join him in Toronto.
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Her entry visa was granted on March 18 — five days before India suspended all international air travel and the last day Canadian officials said foreign nationals were exempt from travel restrictions.
Since then, however, Desai has been unable to get his wife to Canada. He’s completed Immigration Canada’s web form multiple times without success. The responses he gets are always the same, he said, generic replies with no real answers.
“If things don’t move, I think I’m just gonna say goodbye to everything that I’ve made here — to the dreams I have here,” he said.
Problems not limited to India
Immigration Canada did not answer questions about what, if any, countries other than India are experiencing delays in processing renewal applications for expired residency documents, and whether this issue is limited to a specific region.
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However, the government did say India “remains one of the top countries in terms of application volumes.”
“Processing times vary from country to country and IRCC is regularly reallocating resources to address fluctuations in the number of applications,” Fénelon said.
Global News has, however, spoken with people in Bangladesh, Nigeria and the United States who say they too have been unable to get their residency documents renewed, despite having completed the government’s web form on multiple occasions.
There has been a significant drop in immigrants coming to Canada from some countries. For example, in 2019, there were 33,240 permanent residents from India who came to Canada between April and July. But in 2020, during the same period, there were only 13,140 — a drop of more than 20,000. For the Philippines, which had the second-largest decline in immigrants moving to Canada, these numbers were 10,800 in 2019 and 2,750 in 2020.
There are also groups on social media platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram with thousands of members from all over the world who say they’re unable to get their documents renewed. Many of these people express similar frustrations about having quit their jobs in anticipation of moving to Canada, pulling their kids out of school, and burning through life-savings meant to be used to start a new life in Canada.
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Dr. Samira Tasnim, a physician from Bangladesh, said she and her family have been contacting Immigration Canada relentlessly for months with nothing but generic replies.
“I’m a physician and a researcher [but] I’ve quit my job for more than five months now, which is a long break for my career,” she said.
Tasnim says she and her husband also sold their home, furniture and car in anticipation of immigrating to Canada. Instead of using this money to support themselves after moving, they’re now using it to cover basic living expenses since neither of them are working.
“Why are they holding us back? Why are they withholding this extension?” Tasnim said.
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A spokesperson for India’s High Commission in Ottawa told Global News there are no domestic travel restrictions that prevent an Indian citizen with a valid entry visa from travelling to Canada. This includes anyone whose documents expired but are then renewed by the Canadian government.
In August, Air Canada also resumed a limited number of flights between India and Canada, with plans to expand service even further in October, pending approval from India’s aviation ministry.
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.
