Canadian pilots flying over the Prairie provinces, Ontario and Quebec were warned to be on the lookout for an “untethered balloon” on Thursday — warnings that came as a suspected Chinese spy balloon was also reported in American airspace.
Sources had told Global News the surveillance balloon spent time in Canadian airspace, but the details of when and for how long have not been made clear by Canadian authorities.
But a series of NOTAMs (Notice to Air Mission) sent by NAV Canada and reviewed by Global News warned pilots flying into and out of airports in Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City to exercise “vigilance” over the object.
The warnings were issued Thursday evening and also covered several smaller regional airports between western Alberta and eastern Quebec, and are in effect until Feb. 6.
U.S. defence officials confirmed on Friday they expect the surveillance balloon to remain in U.S. airspace over the next few days. Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters the balloon contained surveillance equipment along with a “large payload” underneath it, while not elaborating on what that payload could be.
Later Friday, the Pentagon acknowledged reports of a second balloon flying over Latin America. “We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement, declining to offer further information such as where it was spotted.
Suspected Chinese spy balloon entered Canadian airspace: defence sources
Canadian officials confirmed on Friday that the movements of a high-altitude surveillance balloon are being actively tracked by NORAD. Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said in a Twitter post Friday she had spoken to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the matter.
Canada, Joly said, is working with the U.S. to “take all necessary measures to safeguard Canada’s sensitive information.”
The incident, as well as the American reports, prompted Ottawa to summon China’s ambassador to Canada.
“Yesterday, China’s Ambassador to Canada was summoned by officials at Global Affairs Canada regarding the situation described in the statement issued by the Department of National Defence,” said Maéva Proteau, a spokesperson for Joly, in an email to Global News Friday.
“We will continue to vigorously express our position to Chinese officials through multiple channels.”
Pentagon says Chinese surveillance balloon poses no ‘physical or military threat’
Department of National Defence officials said that Canadians are safe and that the federal government is taking steps to ensure the security of its airspace, including the monitoring of a second potential incident.
“Canada’s intelligence agencies are working with American partners and continue to take all necessary measures to safeguard Canada’s sensitive information from foreign intelligence threats,” a spokesperson for the defence department said on Thursday night.
Blinken was set to visit Beijing this weekend, and his visit would have made him the highest-ranking member of Biden’s administration to visit China. On Friday, he confirmed he had informed his Chinese counterpart that he was postponing the trip “in light of China’s unacceptable action.”
Why is China using a spy balloon in the age of advanced technology?
“Conditions were not conducive for a constructive visit at this time,” Blinken said during a media appearance with South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin at the White House.
He added the Pentagon and U.S. State Department officials are “confident this is a Chinese surveillance balloon” and have taken steps to protect against the collection of sensitive U.S. information.
Blinken would not speculate on when the trip might be rescheduled, stressing the “first step” the U.S. is focused on “is getting the surveillance asset out of our airspace.”
Focus is on removing Chinese surveillance balloon from U.S. airspace: Blinken
I spoke to @SecBlinken about the security of our airspace.
We are collaborating with our American partners and continue to take all necessary measures to safeguard Canada’s sensitive information.
Canadian officials have yet to publicly confirm when or where the balloon entered Canadian airspace. But the locations confirmed by the NOTAMs appear to align with the reported locations of the balloon over the U.S.
On Thursday, the balloon was spotted over Montana, which is home to one of America’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
A photograph of a large white balloon lingering over the area was captured by The Billings Gazette. The balloon could be seen drifting in and out of clouds and had what appeared to be a solar array hanging from the bottom, said Gazette photographer Larry Mayer.
On Friday, the balloon was reported to be flying about 18,300 metres (60,000 feet) as it headed eastward toward Kansas and Missouri.
China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that the balloon was for civilian meteorological and other scientific purposes, and that it regrets that the airship strayed into U.S. airspace. It added that it will continue to maintain communications with the United States to properly handle the unexpected situation.
The explanation was rejected by Pentagon spokesperson Ryder, who reiterated the object was a “surveillance balloon” that violated American airspace and international law.
A senior defence official told Pentagon reporters Thursday that the U.S. has “very high confidence” that the object was a Chinese high-altitude balloon and was flying over sensitive sites to collect information.
A high altitude balloon floats over Billings, Mont., on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. The U.S. is tracking a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been spotted over U.S. airspace for a couple days, but the Pentagon decided not to shoot it down due to risks of harm for people on the ground, officials said Thursday. (Larry Mayer/The Billings Gazette via AP)
Ryder said NORAD continues to monitor the balloon’s course, which was over the centre of the continental United States. He did not elaborate further. The balloon was not a threat to people on the ground, he added.
Canadian political reaction started pouring in on Friday, with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre calling the report “outrageous.”
“It’s outrageous, it’s very concerning that a hostile foreign government had a spy balloon in our airspace that continued to transit into the northwestern United States,” he told reporters in Ottawa.
“We as Canadians should never tolerate espionage by foreign regimes and we should work with our partners in the United States to hold the regime in Beijing accountable.”
Deputy Prime Minister said Canada’s intelligence agencies were working with their American partners to safeguard Canada from foreign intelligence threats.
“We take this very seriously,” she told reporters Friday afternoon.
Poilievre denounces ‘outrageous intrusion’ over reports suspected Chinese surveillance balloon entered Canadian airspace
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised against taking “kinetic action” because of risks to the safety of people on the ground, the Pentagon confirmed. President Joe Biden accepted that recommendation.
Biden declined to comment on the matter when questioned at an economic event. Two 2024 reelection challengers, former President Donald Trump, and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, said the U.S. should immediately shoot down the balloon.
Biden was first briefed about the Chinese surveillance balloon on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. She did not shed light on why the administration waited until Thursday to make its concerns public.
The defence official said the U.S. has “engaged” Chinese officials through multiple channels and communicated the seriousness of the matter.
Suspected Chinese surveillance balloon flying over U.S., won’t be shot down: Pentagon
The balloon’s appearance adds to national security concerns among lawmakers over China’s influence in the U.S., ranging from the prevalence of the hugely popular smartphone app TikTok to purchases of American farmland.
Canadian relations with China have been tense over several years, intensifying in recent months over allegations of attempts to influence and interfere in Canadian affairs.
Global News reported on Nov. 7 that Canadian intelligence officials have warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that China has allegedly been targeting Canada with a vast campaign of attempted foreign interference, and RCMP have asked anyone with experience of Chinese influence through so-called “police stations” believed to be operating in Canada to come forward.
Late last year, Ottawa released its long-awaited Indo-Pacific strategy, with Joly calling China an “increasingly disruptive global power” in a region where multiple countries are showing major economic growth.
“The Indo-Pacific is the fastest growing economic region of the world. By 2030, it will be home to two-thirds of the global middle class and by 2040, it will account for more than half of the global economy,” Joly said.
“Every issue that matters to Canadians, our national security, our economic prosperity, democratic values, climate change or human rights will be shaped by the relationship Canada has with Indo-Pacific countries.”
— with files from The Associated Press, Reuters and Global News
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.
