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Canada’s reputation internationally has been damaged

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Canada’s reputation internationally has been damaged not by the many who protest before the parliament buildings, international bridges, and downtowns of Canada but by our inept and cowardly leaders.

We have seen Bill Blair, Doug Ford, Justin Trudeau, police chiefs of various Canadian cities throughout our nation pass the buck, point their fingers at others in an attempt to not face any accountability for their actions or should I say inaction during these crises. The Bridge in Windsor and Ottawa are smack in Ontario, yet Premier Ford says it’s a federal matter. Bill Blair places any decision-making upon these cities’ police chiefs and Mayors. What has happened is a municipal and provincial matter, yet they all point to The Prime Minister Trudeau who has said all along that the provinces needed to take charge of the situation.

Bill Blair was an opportunist from the get go as police chief in Toronto, and he is so as a federal minister. Doug Ford is fighting a provincial election, so the bad press will be damaging to his brand. Justin Trudeau has just won an election and is supported by Jagmeet Singhs NDP, so he could have stood up and become a leader of the fight for justice and law faction which most Canadians are a member, and yet most blame will fall upon the wee city mayors and their police chiefs. Local heads will fall, like the resignation of police chiefs in Ottawa and surely a mayor or two.

Our police are not the best in the free world, but they certainly try to do their jobs. The fault should fall upon the police who the politicians rely upon for advise. The truck convoy to Ottawa should never have been allowed into the downtown core or even off the main highways they were traveling on to Ottawa. If an accident happens on a highway do the police not close all arterial roads onto the highway, redirecting the traffic away from the accident? Ottawa’s Police knew the convoy was coming days before it arrived. Inaction has resulted in what we have today before our parliament buildings. We are told that politicians cannot influence the police, therefore the Mayor’s and Police Chiefs should bear the brunt of blame.
Our police are also far too worried about hurting others’ feelings or receiving the politicians displeasure.
How do you deal with a protest like what’s happening in Ottawa? Well, I know how to establish and grow a protest and how police will manage and make a protest disintegrate.

Everything is centered upon the following

1. Intelligence Gathering-Every police objective is reliant upon intelligence. Ottawa has proven they have a lousy intelligence department, otherwise, the truck would never have gotten to Ottawa in the first place. So they are there. What to do? Undercover officers must move among the protesters acting as though they sympathize and are a part of the movement.
2,. Intelligence locates protests leaders, trouble makers and which protesters have elderly and children with them. One cannot make a move upon you have a plan.
3. Undercover officers cordon off those mentioned above and locating the innocent must protect and relocate them away from assumed problem area. Friendly, wise persuasion often works. Should potential violence be feared officers will surround and protect the innocent.
4. Officers move towards and into the crowd. The intention is to slowly divide the mass of people away from the mass’s center. The appearance of uniformed officers often gives protesters a chance to re-evaluate their situation and leave. The police will try to find the core of hardliners who will not leave quietly.
Non violence is always the word, after all a fist usually gets a fist in return. Police are to be firm but friendly at all times. Persuasion always trumps unneeded force.
5. Leaders, innocents must be isolated and protected. The police must begin to dismantle any permanent structures asap to dissuade a return of protesters.
6. Should initial violence happen, it will be from a group of protesters and not the police. Remember the police are to be determined but friendly. Always nice and polite until action is needed. The protection of the population is always of prime concern.
7. If there is fear that some protesters may have hidden weapons the police will station snipers at key out of view area’s whose job is to view the crowd and relay intelligence. The use of drones will be very useful. These are used in Britain and the EU. Pretty certain the Ottawa Police don’t have any such advanced technology yet.

Police in Canada often responds to potential violence with violence, as they were trained to do. If all else fails, or you feel threatened fire away. This shows a total lack of real-world training and experience.

With the emergency law passed in Ottawa this week, I fear the police will stop the proposed reforms of their departments and return to their antiquated training. With power comes great responsibilities. I wish these officers and their managers would realize that. The police should be trained as peace officers, and not paramilitary organizations.

Steven Kaszab
Bradford, Ontario
skaszab@yahoo.ca

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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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