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Afghan interpreter says some feel ‘ashamed’ for helping Canada as officials flee Kabul – Global News

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A former Afghan interpreter who worked with Canadian troops during the war says he’s hearing from some stranded in Kabul and facing the Taliban takeover that they now feel “ashamed” for having helped Canada as they watch officials flee the country.

“They told me, ‘It was better to kill us, not what we had been through yesterday,’” said the interpreter, who uses the name Yaqot professionally.

Global News has verified the identity of the interpreter. He spent several years working alongside Canadian soldiers deployed during the Afghan war and now resides in Germany, but has been working over recent weeks to help others escape the Taliban takeover.

“There was no water. There were no toilets there. There was no food. They had no information … the doors were locked. They were on the outside of the airport perimeter. There were Taliban on the other side,” he said. “They didn’t have any information, and they were panicking.

“They were telling me, we were ashamed that we served the Canadian Forces.”


Click to play video: 'The world “cannot and must not” abandon the people of Afghanistan, UN secretary-general says'



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The world “cannot and must not” abandon the people of Afghanistan, UN secretary-general says


The world “cannot and must not” abandon the people of Afghanistan, UN secretary-general says

The Taliban have seized control of Afghanistan in the midst of the U.S. withdrawal. It has seen the country facing intense criticism amid the collapse of the fighting force it spent 20 years and nearly $1 trillion training to hold and defend the country from the extremist insurgent group.

While the withdrawal was widely expected to lead to a Taliban resurgence in many parts of the country, the lightning pace of that blitz left many countries scrambling to evacuate diplomatic staff and burn confidential material held in embassies in the capital of Kabul.

And in that race to escape, it is the Afghans who risked their lives to help the coalition forces — including Canada — who are now at risk of being left behind.

Dire images of thousands packing the tarmac of the Kabul airfield have stunned the world, as have those of desperate Afghans running after some of the final flights departing the runway on Sunday night.


Click to play video: 'Afghanistan crisis: Desperate locals cling to side of US Air Force plane taking off from Kabul'



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Afghanistan crisis: Desperate locals cling to side of US Air Force plane taking off from Kabul


Afghanistan crisis: Desperate locals cling to side of US Air Force plane taking off from Kabul

Amid the panic, Western leaders are facing questions over why they did not act sooner and why so many who helped their troops are now left struggling to find a way out of the crumbling country.

Read more:
7 dead after thousands pack Kabul airport trying to flee Afghanistan amid Taliban takeover

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is running for re-election as the Liberal Party leader, faced questions from journalists on Monday about what actions are underway now to help Afghans left behind.

Trudeau said 807 Afghans who supported Canadians on the ground have been evacuated so far, and 500 of them have arrived in Canada for resettlement, but did not answer whether he plans to recognize the Taliban regime that has seized control of the country.

He said Canada “firmly condemns” the violence unfolding and is working with allies, including the U.K. and U.S., on planning for what comes next.

He added he has not ruled out using military resources to evacuate Afghans.

“We have military still in Afghanistan right now. We are staging out of Kuwait, including with military aircraft. We are looking at, very closely with our allies, what those next steps would be. And that is certainly something that we are looking at, that we haven’t ruled out,” he said.

Trudeau added there are still Canadian citizens and dual citizens who remain on the ground in Afghanistan, and that the government is working to track them “as much as possible in the chaos.”


Click to play video: '‘Some people won’t get back’ from Afghanistan, says emotional U.K. defence secretary'



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‘Some people won’t get back’ from Afghanistan, says emotional U.K. defence secretary


‘Some people won’t get back’ from Afghanistan, says emotional U.K. defence secretary

U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was visibly emotional during an interview with British broadcaster LBC News on Monday morning when asked about attempts to get people out.

“It’s a really deep part of regret for me that some people won’t get back,” he said, his voice cracking, before noting that the U.K. and other countries will have to do their best to process as many fleeing people as possible in third countries.

Wallace added: “It’s sad that the West has done what it’s done, and we have to do our very best to get people out and stand by our obligations and 20 years of sacrifice.”

U.S. President Joe Biden doubled down in defence of the withdrawal on Monday, saying he has no regrets in a speech that emphasized he sees no role for American troops in nation-building.

“We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” Biden said.

“It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces will not.”


Click to play video: 'Canada ‘firmly’ condemns the escalating violence in Afghanistan: Trudeau'



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Canada ‘firmly’ condemns the escalating violence in Afghanistan: Trudeau


Canada ‘firmly’ condemns the escalating violence in Afghanistan: Trudeau

The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on the deteriorating crisis on Monday.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in an address to the members that the dreams of a generation of Afghans, particularly women and girls, now hang in the balance.

“Now is the time to stand as one,” he said, calling on the Taliban to respect human rights and citing “chilling” reports of mounting human rights violations against women and girls.

“It is essential that the hard-won rights of women and girls are protected.”

He also emphasized the risks of allowing Afghanistan to be used as a haven by extremist groups who would seek to threaten and destabilize the rest of the world.

The terrorist group al-Qaeda, responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was permitted by the Taliban to operate at the time out of Afghanistan, which prompted the start of the war to oust the regime and help build a more stable society.

In more recent years, the terrorist group known as Daesh or ISIS has found refuge in failed or failing states like Syria, Yemen, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, as have al-Qaeda splinter groups.

All have urged followers to attack Western countries, including Canada.

With files from Global’s Mercedes Stephenson.


Click to play video: 'Kabul falls to the Taliban as president flees Afghanistan'



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Kabul falls to the Taliban as president flees Afghanistan


Kabul falls to the Taliban as president flees Afghanistan

© 2021 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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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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