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If policing can't end Ottawa's protest, then what can? – CBC.ca

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It wasn’t the most confidence-inspiring of news conferences.

On the sixth straight day of the protest that has immobilized the core of the nation’s capital and harassed local residents, Ottawa officials still gave nothing approaching a timeline of when this all might come to an end.

“I can’t give you a definitive, ‘It’s one day, it’s two days. It’s one week, it’s two weeks,'” police Chief Peter Sloly told council members during a public briefing Wednesday afternoon.

No sense of an end date isn’t what anyone wanted to hear. Even more disturbing, the chief floated the unsettling idea that policing alone won’t end this mess.

The situation is fluid and potentially dangerous. Earlier this week, police apprehended and charged a man with a knife and baton.

While the number of protesters has shrunk to hundreds from thousands last weekend, those who remain set up on downtown streets with their vehicles seem determined to stay until they get what they want.

The demonstrations have gone on for nearly one week, with no obvious end in sight. (Alexander Behne/CBC)

But what they want isn’t exactly clear. Some insist the national vaccine mandate for truckers must be cancelled, others such as the organizers behind a Wednesday news release want general COVID-19 restrictions — largely the provincial government’s measures — lifted.

Still others fantasize about overthrowing the Liberal government with the help of the Governor General and the head of the Senate.

Although police are in contact with some of the convoy “captains,” these folks in no way represent all of the protesters in the city. The chief said participants are associated with dozens and dozens of groups, not to mention the many “lone wolf” types who have attached themselves.

Police negotiations and finger-wagging from politicians at all levels of government haven’t convinced the hardcore to roll out of town. So it may be understandable that Sloly, who’s been open that his approach is to de-escalate and avoid violence, can’t offer an end date to this situation.

What’s far less understandable is why Sloly would float the idea that politicians need to get involved in this protest for it to end, without quite saying so or stating plainly what he meant.

‘Element outside of the police’ needed, says chief

Here’s exactly what he said: “The longer this goes on, the more I am convinced there may not be a police solution to this demonstration.”

WATCH | Ottawa’s police chief on the hurdles to a solution:

‘There may not be a police solution to this demonstration’

23 hours ago

Duration 1:18

Ottawa police Chief Peter Sloly says the hostile and volatile nature of the convoy protest means local police may be unable to bring it to an end without national assistance. 1:18

In fact, he said that a number of times. He explained that this protest isn’t a mere local event but provincial and national in scope. The demands being made by the protesters, however one may view them, are political.

And that’s not any police chief’s purview.

“I don’t have a singular mandate in this city, this province or this country, to negotiate the end to any demonstration. There always needs to be an element outside of the police for any truly successful end to any demonstration, particularly one of this size,” he said.

But asked directly by reporters what he meant, he repeated some version of his above comment. Asked if by non-policing elements, he meant politicians or perhaps the military, he responded, “I think you just listed most of them right there.”

He didn’t elaborate.

WATCH | Ottawa’s most recent former police chief on the protest:

Protest’s ‘potential for escalation is huge,’ says former Ottawa police chief

3 hours ago

Duration 6:45

Calling the situation in Ottawa ‘volatile,’ former police chief Charles Bordeleau says politicians taking photos with protesters are ‘adding fuel to the fire.’ 6:45

Calling in the military is a rare and unlikely scenario, unless the situation escalates to a level of ugliness none want to see.

Sloly did include asking for military help as an option, along with calling in the RCMP (no formal request has yet been made to either), requesting more provincial police help, or filing for a court injunction.

He added he could only recall two incidents in recent history when the armed forces were dispatched: the Oka Crisis in 1990 and the October Crisis in 1970— not exactly reassuring historic examples.

So that leaves politicians. 

It’s not clear what Sloly is suggesting. Should Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or someone in his government speak with the protesters? That’s not happening, say government sources. After all, some fly racist flags and have taken up the  “F–k Trudeau” slogan.

WATCH | Some of Trudeau’s comments on Monday:

Trudeau speaks out on anti-vaccine mandate convoy in Ottawa

3 days ago

Duration 1:46

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says hate speech and racist symbols must not be tolerated in Canada. 1:46

Does the chief think the federal government should open a channel to discuss reducing pandemic restrictions? Again, this seems very unlikely.

Maybe the premier should step in? But Doug Ford is in another city and besides telling protesters to leave and condemning hate symbols and disrespect of monuments, doesn’t seem eager to engage.

It is certainly possible that Sloly is right, that some agency that isn’t his force — or the OPP, or the RCMP, or the army — needs to deal with these folks’ demands. Clearly, pleading with them to leave for the good of the fed-up local community isn’t working. But it’s not responsible to float that possibility before he’s ready to be more precise.

A woman stops to take a photo of signs attached to the fence around Parliament Hill in Ottawa during an ongoing protest against COVID-19 public health measures on Feb. 2, 2022. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

One reporter asked Sloly if the Prime Minister needs to get involved. The chief said “That’s a question for politicians to decide.”

It was a little late to be so circumspect. Mayor Jim Watson, who was at the same briefing and is a politician, didn’t answer either.

So we’re left with no clear end date for this protest, with citizens starting to take things into their own hands by organizing their own protests, escorts and food deliveries, and with the police chief vaguely suggesting that some course of action other than policing will be needed.

People hold signs outside the Ottawa Police Service’s headquarters on Feb. 2, 2022, as demanding the force do more to remove protesters who’ve been rallying against COVID-19 public health mandates and blockading downtown streets for nearly a week. (Jillian Renouf/CBC)

Oh, and one more thing: This weekend, we expect protest reinforcements to come to town and crowds in the downtown to swell again.

If police can’t restore normalcy, then who’s got the solution?

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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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