Ice skaters in front of Ottawa City Hall in Ontario on Dec. 12, 2023.
Jackie Northam/NPR
OTTAWA — On a frigid December evening, ice skaters, bundled up against the cold, zip around an outdoor rink in front of Ottawa’s City Hall. Trees around the rink sparkle with Christmas lights, their bright colors bounce off snow covering the lawn and sidewalks. It is a quintessential Canadian scene, the type that for years shaped how many Canadians saw their place in the world.
Like many Canadians, Jonathan Berkshire Miller grew up with a rosy view of the country’s international role, such as peacekeeping missions.
“Nobody was out there to harm Canadians. And Canadians could be all friends to all people on all issues,” says Miller, the director of foreign affairs, national defense and national security at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a public policy think tank in Ottawa.
But that benign view has been sorely shaken recently.
“We’re starting to wake up to some of these very hard realities, that many states around the world have interests adversarial to Canada,” he says.
Tensions with India have risen over the killing of a Canadian Sikh activist
Even though Canada enjoys a reputation of being a friendly country, over the past year it has found itself in spats with powerful nations — notably, China and India. Ottawa accuses both of meddling in everything from politics to domestic security, which is forcing Canada to reexamine its policies on national security.
Perhaps the starkest example of that came in mid-September, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood before Parliament and announced there was “credible evidence” that agents of the Indian government were involved in the June killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen of Indian descent who was shot dead by masked gunmen outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia.
“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” Trudeau told the House of Commons. He said he had personally and directly brought up the allegations about Nijjar’s killing when he met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 summit in New Delhi roughly a week earlier.
India, which had formally designated Nijjar as a terrorist, denied the accusation, saying it was “absurd.” Nijjar was an activist promoting the creation of an independent homeland, known as Khalistan, for India’s Sikhs.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the G20 Summit in New Delhi, India, Sept. 9. Later that month, Trudeau announced what he called credible allegations that India’s government may have had links to the assassination in Canada of a Sikh activist.
Evan Vucci/AP
Evan Vucci/AP
Ottawa immediately expelled one Indian diplomat. New Delhi retaliated in kind. Canada then withdrew 41 of its diplomats and their dependents, after India threatened to revoke their diplomatic immunity. In a statement, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly and Minister of Immigration Marc Miller called India’s move “unreasonable and escalatory” and contrary to international law.
The news of an extrajudicial killing stunned many Canadians, but the country’s Sikh community was not as surprised. Canada is home to the world’s largest Sikh community outside India — about 770,000, according to the 2021 census — and New Delhi claims many are extremists.
“The history of India’s targeting of Sikhs in Canada … it’s something that Sikhs have lived with for many, many years,” says Balpreet Singh, legal counsel and spokesperson for the World Sikh Organization of Canada. He says Canadian law enforcement did not take those threats seriously until Nijjar’s death.
Mohkam Singh, a Sikh priest, reads the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, at the Gurdwara Sahib temple on the outskirts of Ottawa. Canada’s Sikh community is the second-largest in the world after India’s.
Jackie Northam / NPR
Jackie Northam / NPR
“People in the mainstream are finally aware that India is engaging in very nefarious activities, targeting Sikhs,” he says.
In November, the U.S. also unveiled a plot directed by an Indian government official to kill a Sikh separatist in New York — part of a larger plot to carry out multiple assassinations in both Canada and the U.S., prosecutors said.
According to the unsealed indictment, an unidentified Indian government employee with links to Indian intelligence directed Indian national Nikhil Gupta to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual U.S. and Canadian citizen. Prosecutors said Gupta paid a hitman $100,000 in cash to carry out the assassination, which was foiled.
In his first public comments about the U.S. assassination plot, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Financial Times, “If a citizen of ours has done anything good or bad, we are ready to look into it. Our commitment is to the rule of law,” the paper reported last week.
Meddling by China is also a major concern
Allegations of foreign interference in Canada aren’t limited to India. As early as 2010, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country’s main intelligence agency, warned about China meddling in its affairs. The warning was repeated in June.
There are significant ethnic Chinese communities in Toronto and on the country’s west coast. Dan Stanton, a former intelligence officer with CSIS, says Beijing has slowly been penetrating those communities, trying to promote its interests.
“The threat of foreign interference is so nuanced that it’s easy to look at it and say, what’s the big deal?” says Stanton, now director of national security at University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute. “Incrementally, you see a very comprehensive approach … like they’re hitting all the sectors — media, political, government and diaspora communities, to facilitate the promotion of their policies.”
Colin Robertson, a former diplomat and fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a think tank in Ottawa, says for years, Canada was complacent about the threats facing it, largely because of its geographic position.
“There was some sense that … we were simply sleeping through this because we’ve got the protection of the American security umbrella and we’ve got three oceans and we don’t really have to worry about this kind of thing,” he says.
Canada is now having to grapple with how to stand up to powerful, authoritarian nations wanting to impose their will — without giving up its values, such as protecting human rights.
“If a large power wants to make an example of a middle power, we are almost a sitting duck,” says Sen. Peter Boehm, chair of Canada’s Senate foreign affairs committee.
Jackie Northam / NPR
Jackie Northam / NPR
“If a large power wants to make an example of a middle power, we are almost a sitting duck as the 11th or 12th largest economy in the world,” says Sen. Peter Boehm, chairman of the Canadian Senate’s foreign affairs committee. “We would also be seen as a bit of a surrogate for the U.S. If a country wants to send a message to the U.S., blame Canada.”
There have been a number of other incidents that have shaken Canada from its security complacency. In 2018, China arrested two Canadian citizens, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, in a move broadly seen as retaliation for Canada detaining Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of the Chinese telecommunications giant Hauwei, at the behest of the Trump administration. The two Canadian men were held for more than three years.
Ottawa’s relationship with Beijing soured further after leaked Canadian intelligence reports showed China trying to pressure members of Parliament and skew political campaigns.
Michael Chong, a member of Parliament, says China targeted him in the lead-up to the 2021 federal election. Chong had spoken out against Beijing’s treatment of minority Uyghurs. Intelligence reports leaked to the Globe and Mail newspaper indicated that Chong was targeted as part of a smear campaign by China, and that his relatives in Hong Kong were also targeted.
Supporters of global communications giant Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou watch a live broadcast of her return as they gather at Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport in southern China’s Guangdong Province, Sept. 25, 2021. She returned to China following what amounted to a high-stakes prisoner swap with Canada and the U.S.
Ng Han Guan/AP
Ng Han Guan/AP
Several other ethnic Chinese politicians in Canada were affected by Beijing’s interference. Kenny Chiu, elected to Parliament in 2019 representing the Steveston-Richmond East constituency in British Columbia, was widely expected to be reelected in 2021. But he started calling for a registry for foreign agents as a way to curb outside interference. Speaking from his home near Richmond before the 2021 election, he criticized a Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong. Shortly after, his political fortunes changed.
“When I went door-knocking, people were opening the door and they heard my name and they just basically shut in my face,” he says. “Some people who used to be supporters to the point of willing to plant a lawn sign at their property, they wouldn’t even want to talk to me. That was just within a very short 22 months’ period.”
Chiu says he also faced attacks on social media. He didn’t know why his popularity had nosedived until CSIS reached out to him.
“In October, Canadian Security Intelligence Services had a debrief finally with me, confirming with me that I was under the disinformation campaign attack during the last election,” he says.
Canada is starting to take steps to try and combat foreign interference
The Canadian government is now taking action, and has announced the creation of a new National Security Council. The parliament has launched an inquiry into foreign interference in national elections in 2019 and 2021, with a final report expected by the end of 2024.
Stephanie Carvin, a former intelligence officer now teaching at the Norman Peterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, says Canada has underfunded national security.
Jackie Northam/NPR
Jackie Northam/NPR
Stephanie Carvin, a former CSIS intelligence officer now teaching at Carleton University, says Canada has underfunded its national security. She says it is hoped that the parliamentary inquiry will lead to more robust, enforceable national security policies.
“The fact is that our laws are very much out of date,” she says. “National security tends to be neglected by politicians who would rather provide things like dental plans, like daycare.”
Carvin says combating foreign interference will require coordination among Canada and its allies, including the U.S., Australia and Britain.
Until then, there’s only so much Canada can do, compared to, say, the U.S., says Berkshire Miller of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
“The United States still has that heft where it can push back on certain issues. I think increasingly Canada is seen as a very, very soft and easy target, even though we have strong affiliations and alliances of the United States,” he says.
And that could be tested more in the future, as economic and geopolitical power shifts more toward countries like India and China.
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.
