adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

News

Canadians pay homage to Queen Elizabeth with ceremonies across the country

Published

 on

OTTAWA — Canadians gathered in multiple cities to pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth II Monday, in local services and events following her state funeral in London earlier in the day.

In Ottawa, a national tribute service at Christ Church Cathedral included prayers and memories of her many trips to Canada.

Algonquin spiritual adviser and poet Albert Dumont ushered Queen Elizabeth II into the arms of her husband, Prince Philip, who died 17 months earlier.

“In the land of the red Maple Leaf, the sorrow of many citizens fills the skies,” he said. “The tears, the prayers of her admirers take flight, like the geese of spring and autumn, making their way to the Queen Mother, who waits to hold her daughter close to her bosom once again.”

The service followed a short military parade through downtown Ottawa that saw RCMP officers on horseback and members of the Canadian Armed Forces march past the National War Memorial and Parliament Hill.

In London earlier, several Mounties on horseback led the funeral procession, a tribute to her enduring affection for Canada’s national police force.

Inside Christ Church Cathedral, a who’s who of Ottawa’s political elite gathered to remember the queen, including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and most of the Liberal cabinet, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.

Former governor general Adrienne Clarkson remembered a funny moment from her final conversation with the queen at her Sandringham estate, in which Queen Elizabeth suddenly said in a quiet moment after dinner, “I shall never abdicate.”

“I was rather taken aback and replied, ‘I wouldn’t have expected that you would,’” Clarkson remembered. “And she said, ‘It is not in our tradition. Although, I suppose if I became completely gaga, one would have to do something.’ But she held the course to the end: focused, dutiful, calm, the essence of equanimity.”

Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark, the only living prime ministers who were unable to make the trip to London for the state funeral, were both in attendance at the Ottawa service. In his speech, Mulroney remembered the former monarch with fondness.

“She was extremely intelligent,” he said. “A woman of impeccable judgment. Resolute, selfless, witty — very witty — and kind.”

He also pointed to the role the queen played in ending apartheid in South Africa, something Nelson Mandela called his “greatest triumph.”

Mulroney said that triumph “would never have taken place in the Commonwealth had it not been for Her Majesty’s discreet, brilliant, and generous guidance and unerring instinct for the victory we all sought.”

Tributes and church services took place from St. John’s to Victoria Monday. In Newfoundland and Labrador’s capital, Lt.-Gov. Judy Foote laid a wreath in front of a portrait of the queen during a service at the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

In Winnipeg, a 96-gun salute at the Manitoba legislative building left a trail of smoke and some gathered covering their ears.

Sallie Hunt, who travelled over 200 kilometres to Winnipeg from Kenora, Ont., said the event offered her a sense of closure.

“She’s been the queen all of my life,” Hunt said.

Hunt’s mother was the same age as the queen, and she wore two of her mother’s rings to acknowledge the connection.

In Edmonton, a modest crowd in raincoats watched solemnly at a service at the Alberta legislature and Lt.-Gov. Salma Lakhani reflected on the queen’s fondness for Canada.

“The Commonwealth, as we all know, is an institution that she was dearly committed to,” said Lakhani. “Your Majesty, we will truly miss you.”

In Toronto, bells rang at Old City Hall, continuing once a minute for 96 straight minutes.

Onlookers gathered in small numbers on surrounding sidewalks, some stopping just for a moment to pay their respects while we others stood silently for minutes.

In Charlottetown, a ceremony at St. Peter’s Cathedral began with a Mi’kmaq drum tribute and song.

In Victoria, two women visiting from Ukraine as part of a Canada-Ukraine police training project joined those watching a procession from the provincial legislature to a local cathedral.

“It’s my first time in Canada,” said Kate, who said she could not provide her last name. “I really would like to be part of this historic moment. I think she is a great example of leadership for the whole world, especially women.”

In Ottawa, a parade that began not far from the British consulate included one member carrying the queen’s Canadian flag, folded and wrapped in plastic to protect it from the rain. Upon arrival at the cathedral, the flag was set on a stand at the front of the church.

Sandra Tisch and her husband Rob Semancik drove eight hours from Oldcastle, Ont., near Windsor, and got up early to watch the televised service from London before taking in the Ottawa parade.

“It’s been an emotional 10 days,” said Tisch, who brought flowers to leave at the British High Commission and planned to visit a statue of Queen Elizabeth.

“She gave her life to her country, and I think she did a lot of good.”

Alexandra McLean, the descendant of a British war bride who married a Canadian soldier, said she came out to commemorate the work of the queen and what it symbolizes to those who took up arms in her service.

“We’re mourning our grandmothers as well,” she said.

“We are respecting the head of state, constitutional democracy (and) the woman who served us very well, and we’re honouring the people who loved her, who saw in her service their own service and what gave them strength for that service.”

McLean said that just as King Charles made overtures to the nations of the United Kingdom such as Wales, Canada needs to do more to reconcile with Indigenous nations.

“It’s a really complicated moment, and I don’t think we’ll solve some of these problems without recognizing that they’re family problems.”

Security was evident but not overt, as Ottawa municipal police officers rode on bicycles alongside the marchers in the parade. Snipers were positioned on some building roofs around the downtown area.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2022.

— With files from Keith Doucette in Halifax, Kelly Geraldine Malone in Winnipeg, Dirk Meissner in Victoria, Tyler Griffin in Toronto, and Angela Amato in Edmonton.

 

Mia Rabson, Laura Osman and Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press

News

STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

Published

 on

 

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.

___

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.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

Published

 on

 

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.

___

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.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

Published

 on

 

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.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending