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A plan to plug gaps in the continent’s Arctic defence shield faces roadblocks

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Despite the ballyhoo that surrounded last year’s announcement, it’s becoming clear that the modernization of North American air defence systems — a plan to spend $4.9 billion over six years — has a long way to go and a number of key technical obstacles to overcome.

The Trudeau government announced the long-anticipated NORAD modernization plan back in June during the run-up to the NATO leaders summit — a tense gathering where alliance members, sobered by the war in Ukraine, were expected to show how serious they are about defence spending.

And the planned air defence upgrade was a key talking point for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Defence Minister Anita Anand and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly at the NATO summit in Madrid.

In the months since, however, some of the challenges facing that multi-billion-dollar defence makeover have become glaringly obvious — especially in Canada.

The goal of the modernization programme is to create a layered defence over the Far North that will guard against strategic bombers (the kind NORAD was created to counter more than seven decades ago) but also ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles — the kind of weapons we’ve seen pummeling Ukraine.

Local resident Yana embraces a friend as she reacts outside her mother’s house — damaged in a Russian missile strike — in Kyiv, Ukraine on December 29, 2022. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)

According to the plan, Canada and the U.S. want to improve satellite coverage, introduce modern over-the-horizon radar and deploy undersea sensors and surveillance in the Arctic — especially at the so-called “choke points,” the ocean entrances to the archipelago Canada claims as its sovereign territory.

The good news, according to the Canadian Armed Forces’ operational commander, is that the military has a pretty good handle on surveillance in the Far North at the moment, given the modest level of shipping traffic.

“Do I have decent domain awareness right now? Yes, I do,” said Vice-Admiral Bob Auchterlonie, in charge of Canadian Joint Operations Command. “For example, in the maritime domain there’s only about 150 ships that actually transit the North every year. We know every one of them, we track them very well.”

Look out below

The challenge — or threat — lies under the ocean surface, particularly under the ice where submarines with ballistic or cruise missiles could lurk.

In a year-end interview with CBC News, Auchterlonie said Canada and its allies are always sharing naval intelligence on the whereabouts of adversaries and their major warships, including submarines.

And a host of new technology — some of it still under development — is expected to join NORAD’s underwater network soon, he said.

“I would say that technology has really moved forward in the last number of years. And we’re working with our allies, as well as their own defence scientists, to come up with those capabilities to detect adversaries in our waters … both on the surface and subsurface,” Auchterlonie said.

A titanium capsule with the Russian flag is seen seconds after it was planted by the Mir-1 mini submarine on the Arctic Ocean seabed under the North Pole during a record dive in 2007. (Association of Russian Polar Explorers/AP)

The development of that new tech — which could include portable sensor arrays, unmanned ships and unmanned underwater vehicles built to hunt submarines — is taking place in conjunction with the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet.

Last summer, the U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations presented a plan for revitalizing the fleet by 2045. It calls for a fleet of 373 manned ships and 150 unmanned patrol ships, for a total of 523 ships. The navy has asked the U.S. Congress for more than $250 million US to develop unmanned surface and subsurface ships.

Even though building those new weapons systems is a work in progress, Auchterlonie said Canada is keenly following developments.

That said, he added, Canada and the U.S. could start deploying tech in existence now — such as underwater drones — to protect the North.

The war in Ukraine is driving an undeniable sense of urgency in the West over the need to develop new surveillance technology — and Canada has been watching Moscow’s moves in the North with growing alarm.

The Russian navy’s missile cruiser Marshal Ustinov sails off for an exercise in the Arctic in January, 2022. (Russian Defence Ministry Press Service/The Associated Press)

“Russia is rebuilding its Arctic military infrastructure to Soviet-era capability,” Jody Thomas, the prime minister’s national security and intelligence adviser, recently told the House of Commons defence committee.

“They had stopped. And they’re returning. I think that’s interesting. They’re continuing their construction in the Arctic despite the economic woes they are experiencing because of their illegal and barbaric invasion of Ukraine.”

During his visit to Canada’s Far North last summer, Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, remarked that the shortest route for Russia to attack North America is through the Arctic.

Canadian officials have stated repeatedly that the planned purchase of F-35 stealth fighters and the introduction of modern over-the-horizon (OTH) radar will go a long way toward easing that fear.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrive in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut on Thursday, August 25, 2022. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press)

Over-the-horizon (OTH) radar systems can locate targets beyond the range of conventional radar. They also draw an enormous amount of energy. Defence scientists are trying to figure out how to power the stations in remote northern locations in an environmentally responsible way.

“Due to their extreme size, most OTH radar systems are located in remote areas where access to large amounts of power from the electrical grid is inadequate. Therefore, diesel generators are routinely used,” said a Defence Research and Development Canada technical memo written in 2006, when the military was studying the feasibility of the new systems.

It warned that, to prevent shutdowns, a two-megawatt generator burning 15,000 litres of diesel fuel per day would be required to power an OTH array.

That “leads to a separate problem with continuous fuel supply,” said the memo. “Disruptions in fuel supply (say, due to severe adverse winter weather events) could be mitigated by keeping a reserve of fuel for a few days.”

Two RADARSAT spacecraft are prepared for vibration testing in the MDA facilities in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Que. (Canadian Space Agency)

Perhaps the most immediate and vexing problem facing Canadian officials is the country’s rapidly aging chain of government-owned RADARSAT Constellation satellites. The federal auditor general warned in November that the satellites could outrun their useful lifespan by 2026.

Replacements for those satellites — which are used by several government departments, including National Defence — are still on the drawing board. The current government promised dedicated military surveillance satellites in its 2017 defence policy but — as Auditor General Karen Hogan noted in her recent report — those systems aren’t set for launch until 2035.

Government needs ‘a contingency plan,’ says AG

“What we’re looking for is for the government to have a bit of a contingency plan,” Hogan told the Commons defence committee on Dec. 8, 2022.

“What will happen should these satellites reach the end of their useful lives? Right now, the government either buys information commercially or turns to its allies.”

Nicholas Swale, a senior official in Hogan’s office, told that same committee hearing the satellite system is already overtaxed.

“There are multiple departments seeking information from these satellites and their needs are currently not being met,” he said.

In a year-end interview with CBC News, Gen. Wayne Eyre, the chief of the defence staff, was asked whether the Department of National Defence will speed up a program to launch dedicated satellites before 2035.

“At this point, I don’t know,” he said. “But we’re certainly going to try.”

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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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.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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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.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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