Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced Thursday the federal government has created two new pathways for Ukrainians fleeing their war-torn country to come to Canada — part of a plan to accept an “unlimited number” of people who want to leave.
To start, Fraser said his department has created a new visa category that will allow a limitless number of Ukrainians to come to Canada to live, work or study here for up to two years.
People accepted under the Canada Ukraine Authorization For Emergency Travel program will have an open work or study permit and employers will be free to hire as many Ukrainians as they want.
Fraser said the federal government is waiving most of the typical visa requirements but applicants will still need to supply biometrics and undergo a background screening process before leaving for Canada. The application process will open in two weeks’ time.
Fraser said the department is prepared for a possible influx of Ukrainians and there are biometric kits and personnel ready to assist would-be applicants at diplomatic posts in Warsaw, Vienna and Bucharest and at 30 other locations throughout Europe. Canada is also waiving application fees for all Ukrainians who want to avail themselves of this program.
NDP wants Canada to drop visa requirement
Fraser also announced the government is introducing an “expedited path” to permanent residency for Ukrainians with family in Canada. The minister said a “wider circle of family members” will be able to sponsor Ukrainians who want to come to Canada on a more permanent basis.
Some critics, including NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, have called on the government to drop the visa requirement altogether to allow all Ukrainians to travel to Canada unencumbered.
WATCH | Canada introducing two new pathways for Ukrainians fleeing war to come to this country:
Canada announces new options for Ukrainians to come to Canada
5 hours ago
Duration 2:41
Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced new programs that will help support Ukrainians fleeing war make their way to Canada to work, study or reunite with their families. 2:41
Asked about the possibility of visa-free travel for Ukrainians, Fraser said that sort of change would require 12 to 14 weeks of work to implement because the department’s IT systems would need “certain renovations” and airlines would have to change their normal processes. He said the situation is urgent and there’s no time for a three-month delay.
Fraser also said it’s prudent to conduct background checks on all applicants to weed out any Russian collaborators. He said a blanket visa waiver would mean some people could “slip through the cracks,” including people aligned with Russia who have attacked Ukrainian forces in the breakaway regions of the Donbas.
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress said the new pathways will help some of the nearly one million people who’ve already fled the country.
“Canada, together with all civilized nations, is mobilizing in support of efforts to help these innocent people. Our community is grateful,” the group’s president, Alexandra Chyczij, said in a media statement.
“Russia is trying to destroy Ukrainian cities and towns from the air. These are crimes against humanity that are causing a humanitarian catastrophe not seen in Europe since World War II.”
Canada slaps massive tariff on all Russian imports
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland also announced Thursday more measures to tighten the screws on the Russian economy.
As punishment for what Freeland called a “barbaric” invasion of Ukraine, Canada is slapping a steep 35 per cent tariff on all exports from both Russia and Belarus — a country that has been used as a staging ground by Russian troops. The change could effectively halt all trade between Canada and these former Soviet bloc countries.
Canada is also levying sanctions on two major Russian oil and gas producers, Rosneft and Gazprom. The move follows an earlier decision to halt all petroleum imports from Russia.
With the addition of these two major oil companies, Canada has now sanctioned more than 1,000 Russian individuals and entities.
WATCH: The refugee crisis at the Poland-Ukraine border is getting worse
Trudeau says Canada’s response to Ukrainian refugees is built off the Syrian refugee crisis
1 hour ago
Duration 2:17
Trudeau said ‘we are guided by the same values, the same principles but adjust to what the needs are on the ground.’ 2:17
Freeland said Canada and its G7 partners already have imposed the strongest sanctions ever inflicted on a major economy. She said “more will follow in the days to come” as Russian forces continue to bombard Ukrainian cities with rockets and missiles.
“We will do everything in our power to make sure President Putin and his accomplices pay the price of this grave historical mistake,” Freeland said. “We cannot allow him to succeed and we will not.”
Freeland said Western actions have crippled the Russian economy.
The country’s central bank has hiked the benchmark interest rate to 20 per cent — a move that will obliterate Russian savings and push up the price of everything. The country’s stock exchange has been shuttered for four days.
Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, left, and Minister of National Defence Anita Anand hold a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday, March 3, 2022. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
Two major credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have downgraded Russian government debt to junk status, which will make it increasingly difficult for Putin and his regime to borrow any money to fund its war machine. The country’s currency, the ruble, has been on a precipitous decline since the invasion and the resulting sanctions, dropping in value by some 30 per cent against the U.S. dollar.
“The economic costs of the Kremlin’s barbaric war machine are already high and they will continue to rise,” Freeland said. “I do want the Russian leadership to understand that we’re going to keep going. There is a tremendous willingness among the world’s democracies to just continue ratcheting up the pressure.”
Government promises to address tariff fallout
At a separate announcement on support for small businesses, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government is prepared to help any companies that experience disruption as a result of Canada’s aggressive economic actions against Russia.
While Canadian companies have relatively little exposure to the Russian economy — two-way trade plummeted after Putin’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 — there could be some fallout for some importers now faced with a maze of red tape and eye-popping sanctions on the goods they bring in from the region.
With oil out of the picture, Canada’s largest import from Russia is platinum.
WATCH: Trudeau says Canada’s response to Ukrainian refugees is built off the Syrian refugee crisis
The growing humanitarian crisis at Poland-Ukraine border
16 hours ago
Duration 2:16
A train station near the Poland-Ukraine border is the site of a growing humanitarian crisis as many Ukrainians arrive without money and an uncertain future ahead, something Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly witnessed first-hand. 2:16
In 2019, Canada’s largest exports to Russia were planes, helicopters and spacecraft, radioactive chemicals and animal feed. The recently announced ban on export permits could make it difficult for those goods to ever make it to their intended Russian recipients. Putin may also retaliate against countries that have levied sanctions on him and his country.
“Our approach on this has been to go as hard and as fast, as quickly as we could, in coordination with our allies around the world,” Trudeau said.
“Obviously, this may last some time and as we move forward in this situation we will take a look at how we can minimize the impacts on Canadians. But our priority right now is sending the strongest signal of condemnation and penalties to Putin and Russia that we possibly can.”
Canada deploys more lethal military aid
To help Ukrainians in the fight against Russian forces, Defence Minister Anita Anand announced Canada will provide more lethal aid to the country.
Anand said Canada is sending 4,500 M72 rocket launchers and 7,500 hand grenades drawn from existing Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) stockpiles. She said these supplies will be deployed “as quickly and as safely as possible.”
This shipment builds on a previous commitment to send Ukraine up to $10 million worth of lethal and non-lethal aid, including sniper rifles, carbines, pistols, body armour and 1.5 million rounds of ammunition.
Canada is also granting Ukraine some $1 million to purchase “high-resolution satellite imagery,” which will give Ukrainian forces the ability to monitor the movement of Russian forces as they continue their incursion.
“We are going to keep adding to the measures to support Ukraine sovereignty, security and territorial integrity. The brutality of what we’re seeing on our screens is angering everyone,” Anand said.
“A more violent conflict is not what Ukraine, Canada and the rest of the world wants or needs. We want peace.”
In this Sept. 13, 2021 file photo, military vehicles and tanks of Poland, Italy, Canada and United States roll during the NATO military exercises ”Namejs 2021” at a training ground in Kadaga, Latvia. NATO responded to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula by beefing up alliance forces and conducting drills on the territories of its easternmost members. (Roman Koksarov/AP Photo)
The CAF also has roughly 3,400 military personnel on “high readiness alert” for a possible deployment to the region to offer more protection to NATO countries that border Russia. Anand said NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe will decide if those Canadian troops will be dropped into a country like Latvia in the coming weeks.
Canada already has troops on the ground as part of Operation Reassurance, which has placed CAF personnel in central and eastern Europe to carry out assurance and deterrence measures.
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.
