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Canadian men’s soccer team qualifies for World Cup with 4-0 win over Jamaica – Global News

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Canada put on a show Sunday, qualifying for the men’s World Cup for the first time since 1985.

Cyle Larin, Tajon Buchanan and Junior Hoilett scored as the Canadians had their way with an outmatched Jamaica side in a 4-0 win before a loud and proud sellout crowd of 29,122 on a chilly day at BMO Field.

A Jamaican goal on its own net in the 89th minute padded the score. Yet, the margin of victory could have been far more lopsided.

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World Cup host status could net 174,000 visitors and 3,300 jobs for Toronto

Canada (8-1-4, 28 points in the final CONCACAF qualifying round) dominated from the get-go, stacking scoring chances like firewood. The home side was up 1-0 after 13 minutes and 2-0 at the break. It could have been 4-0 midway through the first half when the sun made its first appearance.

Jamaica (1-7-5, eight points) spent the afternoon in reverse. The game was done and dusted after the first half.






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Canada men’s national soccer team aims to make history


Canada men’s national soccer team aims to make history

The historic win came 37 years after Canada qualified for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico with a 1-0 victory over Honduras on Sept. 14, 1985, in St. John’s, N.L. That marked the Canadian men’s lone trip to the international soccer showcase, where they lost all three games without scoring a goal.

Canadian soccer has been on a high with the sixth-ranked Canadian women winning gold last summer at the Tokyo Olympics. Now the 33rd-ranked men, led by coach John Herdman, get their time to shine in Qatar, while lengthening their runway to the 2026 World Cup, which Canada is co-hosting with the U.S., and Mexico.

The Canadian men, who lead the eight-country final round-robin, also had a chance to seal qualification on Thursday in Costa Rica but lost 1-0 after playing two-thirds of the game with 10 men in the wake of Mark-Anthony Kaye’s red card.

It marked the lone blemish on their qualifying road. Going into Sunday’s match, Canada had outscored its opposition 50-7 while posting 11 clean sheets in 18 qualifying games over three rounds (13-1-4).

On a cold day Canada came out hot and was rewarded for its dominance in the 13th minute, when after a lightning-fast counterattack, Hoilett squared the ball to Stephen Eustaquio who threaded the needle to put Larin behind the defence. The Besiktas forward calmly slotted the ball past Jamaican goalkeeper Andre Blake for his 24th goal for Canada, extending his national men’s scoring record.

Buchanan made it 2-0 in the 44th minute as Jamaica failed to deal with a free kick that the Club Brugge winger had earned after being chopped down in the midst of several stepovers. A defender headed Eustaquio’s free kick away but it went straight to Jonathan David, whose cross dropped at Buchanan’s feet in front of goal.

He celebrated the goal with his trademark backflip.

Hoilett made it 3-0 in the 83rd after Buchanan nicked the ball off a defender following a corner and fed the veteran Hoilett, who slashed through the penalty box and beat Blake for his 14th goal for Canada.






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Team Canada on the verge of qualifying for World Cup


Team Canada on the verge of qualifying for World Cup

Adrian Mariappa’s failed attempt at a clearance off a Sam Adegukbe cross ended up in the Jamaican goal to make it 4-0.

In later games Sunday, Costa Rica was at El Salvador, Panama at the U.S. and Mexico at Honduras.

The Canadians, who wrap up qualifying Wednesday in Panama, only needed a draw Sunday to qualify. Other qualification routes included Costa Rica failing to win or a Panama victory over the U.S.

The top three teams qualify for Qatar as representatives of North and Central America and the Caribbean while the fourth-place finisher takes on an Oceania side in an intercontinental playoff to see who joins them.

A blanket of snow greeted players and fans in Toronto when they woke up Sunday, although almost all of it disappeared by kickoff. Thanks to BMO Field’s underground heating, there was just a dusting of white in parts of the patchy field.

There were light flurries at kickoff. Somehow the conditions made the encounter more Canadian.

“Our House. Our Day. All of Canada is with you,” Canada Soccer tweeted in a video heralding the game, accompanied by the sounds of “Coming Home” by Diddy and Dirty Money featuring Skylar Grey.

The Canadians dealt with worse in snowy Edmonton last November when they defeated Mexico and Costa Rica.

Still it was a chilly, windy afternoon with the temperature minus-five, feeling like minus-14 for the 4 p.m. ET kickoff. It didn’t faze Larin, Richie Laryea or substitute Alistair Johnston, who wore short-sleeved jerseys.






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Canadian men’s soccer team battles for spot in World Cup


Canadian men’s soccer team battles for spot in World Cup

Canadian flags flew proudly with a few Ukrainian ones dotting the sellout crowd.

Herdman made four changes to his starting lineup in Costa Rica, inserting defenders Scott Kennedy, Adekugbe and Doneil Henry and winger Hoilett. Adekugbe and Henry were suspended for the Costa Rica game.

Goalkeeper Milan Borjan took over as skipper from Atiba Hutchinson.

Canada wasted little time with Blake having to claw away an Adegukbe cross in the second minute. Blake then had to stop a fourth-minute Larin shot after a fine run by David, prompting chants of “Can-a-da, Can-a-da.”

David shot just wide in the 15th minute after another Canadian attack. Six minutes later, Buchanan shot high.

The crowd cheered when Borjan was finally called into the action to make a save in the 32nd minute.

Larin shot just wide after in the 38th minute, taking a cross from Adegukbe after a glorious ball from Hoilett found the fullback flying down the left flank.

The game opened up as the first half wore on with Jamaica finding some space in the Canadian end as the home side threw bodies forward-looking. Canada has 65 per cent possession in the first half and a 11-2 edge in shots (4-1 in shots on target).

It was more of the same in the second half with Buchanan just missing a low cross from Larin across the goal as play resumed. David shot wide minutes later.

Read more:

Canadian men’s national soccer team hungry to seal World Cup qualification against Jamaica: coach

Henry limped off in the 62nd minute with Herdman going to his bench. Borjan wasted little time giving up the captain’s armband when Hutchinson came on for his 94th cap, extending his Canadian men’s record. Chants of “Atiba, Atiba” followed.

Blake stopped substitute Lucas Cavallini in the 82nd minute, with chants of “Ole, Ole” from the crowd. Buchanan then tried to flick a corner home from the near post.

The Canadian men qualified the hard way this time. While CONCACAF powerhouses like Mexico and the U.S. got a bye to the final round, Canada had to start at the bottom in the region.

Herdman’s team had to dispatch Aruba, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Suriname and Haiti just to reach the final round of qualifying for the first time since the lead-up to France ’98.

“If we look at it the right way, it just could be one hell of a story,” Herdman said prophetically in July 2019 when CONCACAF revamped its qualifying procedure.

Thursday marked the four-year anniversary of Herdman’s first game in charge of the men, a 1-0 win over New Zealand in Murcia, Spain, before just 75 people. His record at the men’s helm now stands at 29-7-4 with the only losses to the U.S. (twice), Mexico (twice), Costa Rica, Haiti and Iceland.

Already qualified in the 32-team men’s World Cup field are host Qatar, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and Uruguay.

Canada has been to seven of eight women’s World Cups, missing out only on the inaugural event in 1991. The women finished fourth at the 2003 tournament in the U.S.

Jamaica was one of five teams to receive a bye to the final round of CONCACAF qualifying but managed just one win — a 2-0 decision in Honduras on Oct. 13.

The Canadian men were ranked 73rd in the world compared to No. 47 for Jamaica, when they started World Cup qualifying in March 2021. Today Canada is 33rd while Jamaica is No. 62.

Still there was hope in the Jamaican camp.

Read more:

Canadian soccer team’s bid for World Cup qualification put on hold in Costa Rica

“Fearless Reggae Boyz to Spoil Canadian Party” was the headline in Jamaica’s Gleaner newspaper.

Canada drew Jamaica 0-0 when the teams met Oct. 10 at the National Stadium in Kingston. The Canadian men improved to 10-6-7 all-time against Jamaica including 7-0-2 on home soil.

The Reggae Boyz are led by interim coach Paul Hall, who played for Jamaica at the 1998 World Cup in France.

Jamaica was missing Aston Villa winger Leon Bailey, absent due to a personal issue, with West Ham star forward Michail Antonio one of several other high-profile absentees. Vancouver Whitecaps fullback Javain Brown started for the visitors.

Canada was without Kaye, suspended after being sent off for two yellows in Costa Rica.

© 2022 The Canadian Press

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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.

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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.

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