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Democratic control of U.S. Senate could be good news for Canada, expert says – CTV News

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TORONTO —
Democrats took back control of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday after winning two hard-fought runoff elections in Georgia, granting president-elect Joe Biden far greater leeway to turn his campaign promises into reality.

The victories by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock give Democrats and Republicans each 50 seats in the U.S. Senate. That means any ties on the Senate floor will be settled by vice-president-elect Kamala Harris.

Biden and Harris campaigned on a platform that experts say could have wide-ranging impacts on Canadian industries and political relations. Now that Democrats have won full control of Congress, here’s a look at how the new political landscape could have ripple-effects north of the border.

DEMAND FOR CANADIAN EXPORTS

Senate control means Democrats will have an easier time passing additional stimulus money they’ve been pushing for. Speaking ahead of the Georgia runoffs, Biden said that $2,000 stimulus cheques would be sent out “immediately” should Democrats win both races.

More stimulus money could buoy the American economy and would “certainly benefit” Canadian exporters that rely on U.S. markets, according to Wayne Petrozzi, a professor emeritus from Ryerson University.

“That stimulus will increase the appetites of Americans for imports and keep American manufacturing facilities running that need raw materials. So I think that certainly impacts Canada in a positive way,” Petrozzi told CTVNews.ca on Wednesday.

Biden has also promised more funding for cities struggling with falling tax revenue amid the pandemic. A financial lift could be good news for Canadian manufacturers that make light rail, buses or other transit options.

“I think generally the stimulus, in terms of payments to individuals … will just have the effect of generally putting a floor under the American economy and increasing confidence amongst manufacturers to bring back staff in some cases or to increase production. And the demand for Canadian raw materials is going to be there.”

But Petrozzi also pointed out that the filibuster — a procedural way of delaying a vote on the Senate floor — could still be a serious procedural headache for Democrats. Because of this, he expects Biden to use plenty of executive orders, not unlike Trump did, to carry out his agenda.

HARD PIVOT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Biden has promised to put the U.S. back into the Paris climate change pact and roll out a suite of domestic policies that cut back on emissions, a move that experts have previously said would be good news for Canadian industries currently competing against American companies with fewer environmental regulations.

Biden has also issued a US$1.7-trillion “Clean Energy Revolution” plan that includes investing heavily in green technology and aggressively pursuing making the U.S. power sector emissions-free by 2035. The goal is to position the U.S. as a leader in green tech and create thousands of new jobs.

Getting that high-budget plan through a Republican-controlled Senate would’ve been an uphill battle, but Democrats may now face fewer roadblocks in passing such legislation.

If the Biden administration makes good on those big-budget green promises, they could spur greater competition in Canada, according to Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who researches environmental policy, in an earlier interview with CTVNews.ca. In particular, green hydrogen, a clean but costly alternative to fossil fuels, could see some healthy market competition.

“If the U.S. is pouring trillions of dollars into green tech, that changes the situation,” he said. “All of a sudden, Canadian producers of green hydrogen … they start saying, ‘Now we need to ramp things up.’”

TAXING BIG TECH

Biden has made clear that he wants to increase the overall corporate tax rate and make sure that big tech companies, such as Amazon and Netflix, pay their fair share.

“Let me be clear: Hardworking Americans should not be paying more in federal income taxes than Amazon or Netflix,” Biden tweeted four days before the election.

In Australia, the government has taken steps to force Facebook and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to share advertising revenue with local media firms. The United Kingdom has passed a digital services tax in hopes of getting companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook to pay higher domestic taxes.

The Canadian government has announced its own plans to require multinational companies like Netflix and Amazon to collect GST or HST on digital products and services in 2021.

If the Biden administration cracks down on big tech companies, it could inspire Canada to go even further with its own plans, Petrozzi said.

“The fact that the incoming administration is likely moving in a similar direction can’t hurt, it can only help us,” he said.

FIGHTING COVID-19, REOPENING BORDER

Biden has vowed to aggressively clamp down on the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. by signing a mask mandate on his first day in office and by vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office.

Trump has not gone as far in pushing for universal masking and has, at times, encouraged anti-mask protesters who defied their state’s lockdown measures.

With Democrats controlling Congress, they could push through even tougher measures designed to mitigate the outbreak, Petrozzi said.

“I think the renewed and increased emphasis on coming to terms with and conquering the current pandemic in the United States will have very significant economic benefits,” he said.

He points to industries such as cross-border tourism or Toronto’s convention centres, which have greatly suffered due to the border shutdown. The sooner the U.S. flattens the curve and follows through on widespread vaccinations, the sooner life can return to normal, Petrozzi said.

“There is tremendous pent-up demand on the American side for travel. Canada has always been a favourite economic destination. Our government with the current Trump administration was never going to open those borders. You’d have to be out of your mind to open Windsor given what was happening in Michigan.”

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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