After years apart, Elizabeth Taliana says she booked a flight for her daughter to fly out from Toronto to Vancouver.
Her daughter only gets one week of vacation from work during the summer.
Even though she made the reservation more than two months ago, Taliana says she only learned recently that her daughter’s flight had been cancelled, a trend Canadians are becoming all too familiar with.
“I have not seen my daughter in almost six years, so this is very distressing,” Taliana told CTVNews.ca in an email.
Her story is similar to many shared with CTVNews.ca in recent days as cancelled flights, delays and lost luggage throw a wrench in Canadians’ summer travel plans, due in part to staffing shortages at Canadian airports.
Some report sleeping at airports due to cancellations and delays. One person, flying from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island, said it took two cancelled flights and an extra day to get home, while his luggage — filled with 70 frozen lobsters — took two days to arrive.
The responses were emailed to CTVNews.ca and have not all been independently verified.
Samantha Van Noy says she lost three pieces of luggage that, at the time she wrote to CTVNews.ca, hadn’t arrived in more than eight days.
Flying to Chicago for a tradeshow, Van Noy says her booth materials were in her luggage and the amount of money lost due to her airline’s “incompetence is incalculable.”
“I tell everyone don’t fly unless you absolutely need to right now,” she said.
Kimberly Horton, a Canadian living in Austin, Texas, said she bought three tickets in February for herself, her husband and their son to fly to Toronto to visit her family, whom she hasn’t seen in three years due to COVID-19.
“What was supposed to be a joyous celebration turned into heartbreak and disappointment,” Horton said.
She says the airline placed her husband on standby because the flight was overbooked.
After calling customer service twice, and being on hold for an hour and 40 minutes, she says she was told there was nothing that could be done.
“My husband was denied boarding and my son was crying as we left,” she said.
After being asked to check her carry-on luggage due to a lack of overhead compartment space, Horton says her bag never showed up.
“It had all of my valuables, medications, contact lenses, my son’s retainers, my Invisalign, etc. Things you need and can’t replace on vacation,” she said.
She got her bag three days later. Meanwhile, her husband was able to get on another flight, only to have it evacuated due to a fuel spill.
“That was the final breaking point for my husband. He was exhausted of everything and asked for his luggage back. They returned his bags reeking of jet fuel and he headed home cancelling his vacation with us,” Horton said.
‘PEARSON AIRPORT BRINGS THE WORST OUT OF PEOPLE NOW’
Oksana Klausmann had booked a trip from Toronto to New York City for late June and says after a lengthy check-in process, she and her daughter went through customs only to discover that they were not on the flight manifest, despite having their boarding passes.
From there, she says they were taken to a small room packed with other families, children, and seniors, among others.
She described the room as not having enough seats for everyone, forcing some to sit on the floor, and one small washroom with no soap, toilet paper or paper towels. Klausmann says there were no cups for the water fountain.
Several hours later, they received an email saying their flight was cancelled. An agent then arrived with a pair of police officers confirming the situation.
“What happened next should never happen to my daughter and me. Riot, angry people, screaming, yelling, pushing, and a lot more,” she said. “It was unsafe, scary, violent, and hostile. I took my daughter and we tried to leave the room filled with more than 200 or 300 angry people.”
Having already booked a hotel and shows in New York, Klausmann says cancelling the trip wasn’t an option.
They found a flight with another airline that cost nearly as much as the entire trip. They went through another lengthy check-in process, but eventually made it to New York.
Once back at Toronto Pearson, following a long delay on their return flight, Klausmann says only 15 passengers were allowed to leave the plane at a time due to congestion at customs.
“Believe me that people were not happy about it and some of them started to come forcefully from the back of the plane to be on the front to get off the plane,” Klausmann said.
Frustrations only continued as people started waiting for their luggage.
“Pearson Airport brings the worst out of people now, not everyone can stay calm in these circumstances and they put other people at great risk,” she said.
“We, two Canadians, a daughter and a mom, going on a trip to have fun and enjoy time together, should never have such an experience. We paid for someone’s mistakes and inability to provide service with our own money that could be used for different purposes.”
People sleep on a bench as they wait at Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport, in Montreal, June 29, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
‘DEFEATED AND DISCOURAGED’
Lori Veltkamp had planned a three-week trip to Greece with her two daughters. She bought her tickets in January and was scheduled to fly direct from Toronto to Athens in late June.
In anticipation of a busy scene at Pearson, she says she and her daughters arrived more than five hours before their departure time, but were placed on standby and told to wait for their seat assignments at the gate.
Veltkamp says the flight encountered further delays due to the plane’s meals arriving late.
Later, she said she was “devastated” to learn that they would not get on the plane because they booked their flights through a third party and “were basically put at the bottom of the list to get off of standby.”
“They rushed us off to a gate that was boarding heading to Venice, but it would have an eight-hour layover in Venice before we would fly to Athens,” she said.
They managed to catch the flight with the layover in Venice. But five days into their trip, Veltkamp says they still haven’t received their three suitcases.
“We are three people with basically no clothes and have had to purchase new things. We are hopeful that we will receive our luggage soon but are feeling very defeated and discouraged by this entire experience,” she said.
CANCELLED FLIGHTS AND CALLS FOR CHANGE
After his flight from Prince George, B.C., to Toronto for July was cancelled, Harmolk Brar said he was given an option of cancelling the flight online for a refund.
Opting for this, he says the airline wanted to charge him $150 plus tax in penalties.
“A cancellation penalty for flights that they have already cancelled,” he said. “This is the most preposterous thing I’ve heard of.”
Jamie Boulter and her husband had plans to fly from Moncton, N.B., to Hamilton, Ont., in July for a few days.
She received an email saying their flight had been cancelled and that they would receive a follow-up explaining how to get a refund or rebook, potentially flying to Toronto through the airline’s sister company instead, which she says would have created more problems since they booked a rental car in Hamilton.
Boulter said her only options were to rebook with the same airline for July 4, the day she was supposed to fly back to New Brunswick, or cancel.
She chose to cancel and was told her refund would be less than half of what she originally paid. Boulter said she has tried unsuccessfully to reach someone from the airline by phone, an online contact form and social media.
“I had paid for three nights at a hotel and it was non-refundable by the point I learned my flight was cancelled. I also paid for concert tickets to two shows, which were non-refundable,” she said.
“The concert was a two-night performance of my favourite band, playing their first album in its entirety on the 20th anniversary of that album, in their hometown. This experience was going to be huge for me. I’m so soured by this experience.”
While Pearson has seen some of the worst travel experiences so far this year, Richard Vanderlubbe, an Association of Canadian Travel Agencies director and president of tripcentral.ca, says delays at larger airports can cascade to smaller ones.
“It’s one of those things that’s like a tightly tuned drumhead. There’s not much slack in the system,” he told CTV News Channel on Saturday.
“If you have a pilot or a crew that calls in sick, and people are still getting sick, the airline has to scramble to find a qualified pilot for that aircraft. And by the time they get a hold of somebody, it is a matter of changing the pilots on different routes in order to make this happen and to have less impact on the connections.”
Ultimately, he says it isn’t much fun for the airlines either, who have to bear the cost of delivering lost luggage by courier to people’s homes.
A spokesperson for the company said it would reduce its schedule by 154 flights per day on average for those two months, with the most affected routes expected to be to and from Toronto and Montreal.
Prior to that, Air Canada operated approximately 1,000 flights per day.
Vanderlubbe said while reasonable, the Air Canada reductions will affect people’s future travel plans, with fares possibly going up as a result.
“I’m hopeful that as that unfolds, we’re going to see less of this and by the time we hit further into the summer and perhaps Labour Day, it’s hopefully gone,” he said.
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.
