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Inuit 15 times more likely to be jailed in Quebec than the provincial average

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Osman Ilgun was arrested in September 2021 and soon transferred to a detention centre 1,500 kilometres away from his home in the Inuit community of Quaqtaq in Quebec’s Nunavik region.

At the jail in Amos, Que., he was fed raw food — he says he believes guards stereotypically assumed Inuit people eat raw meat. He said he was forced to quarantine for 28 days, adding he had limited access to showers and phone calls with family during that time.

“My mother, she was so worried because I didn’t have access to the phone to tell her what’s going on,” said Ilgun, who was charged with sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Ilgun was one of the 617 Inuit people admitted to a Quebec jail in the 12 months ending March 31, 2022. That number represents 4.5 per cent of the 13,613 Inuit living in the province — a rate 15 times higher than the average incarceration rate in Quebec, provincial data shows. It’s also a rate almost twice as high as that of any other Indigenous group in the province.

The disproportionate detention rates for the Inuit are a result of an “outraging lack of resources that would not be tolerated anywhere else in Quebec,” said David Boudreau, a legal aid lawyer who has been working in the province’s North for more than five years.

Boudreau said programs aimed at preventing crime and diverting offenders from the justice system are often not available in Quebec’s Nunavik region, home to the majority of Inuit who live in the province.

Sexual education programs and services to help people heal from trauma have been lacking in the region for decades, “which leads to that never-ending cycle of abuse,” he said. Nunavik courts handle many sexual abuse cases, but treatment programs open to offenders in southern Quebec aren’t available to those living in the North, he added.

Often, the only professional support accessible to residents is provided by social workers who usually come from the south and are “often” asked to address problems beyond their professional capacity, Boudreau said.

As a result, he said, Inuit offenders are more likely to be jailed rather than sentenced to house arrest or given conditional sentences.

“Judges are truly sensitive to the lack of resources, but it’s beyond their power to do anything about it,” he said. “They have to work with what they have … What’s missing is political will to try and put in place some programs that are ultimately going to help reduce the criminality rate.”

Inuit represent slightly more than 0.16 per cent of Quebec’s population but accounted for 2.45 per cent of provincial detainees during the year ending March 31, 2022.

Mylène Jaccoud, a criminology professor at Université de Montréal who studies the criminalization of Indigenous people in Quebec, said that while non-Inuit Indigenous Peoples are over-represented in provincial jails, there’s an “over, over-representation of Inuit.”

Data from the federal and provincial governments show 12.4 per cent of Indigenous people in Quebec are Inuit, but they accounted for 35 per cent of Indigenous people in provincial custody in the year ending March 31, 2022.

Jaccoud said the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement gave the Inuit a level of self-government. But that self-governing process isn’t as advanced in the North as it is in other Indigenous communities, such as the Cree territories, she said.

“The Cree have taken charge of their administration of justice, while the Inuit have not. That’s a big difference,” Jaccoud said, adding that most police officers in the region aren’t Inuit. Of the 88 officers who worked at the Nunavik Police Service in May 2022, only four were Inuit, while about 90 per cent of the people they serve are Inuit.

The Nunavik Police Service declined an interview request.

There is no jail in the North, so detainees are usually sent to Amos, Que., more than 1,000 kilometres south of Nunavik’s largest community of Kuujjuaq.

A 2022 class-action lawsuit filed against the provincial government on behalf of more than 1,500 Inuit detainees alleges the rights of Inuit are systematically violated when they are transferred long distances from home.

The lawsuit has been authorized by a judge and alleges the length of time Inuit people are often detained before bail hearings is unconstitutional; they are often flown to Montreal before they are driven around 600 kilometres northwest to Amos. The suit also alleges that Inuit detainees are frequently strip searched during the multiple stages of the journey to Amos and often plead guilty to charges in order to get out of extended pretrial detentions.

Ilgun, who worked as a firefighter and paramedic for 15 years, said he was left with post-traumatic stress disorder after he was unable to save a relative who had suffered a serious injury. A colleague underwent similar trauma and took his own life, he said.

He said provincial regulations stipulate that first responders — as a way to protect their mental health — shouldn’t provide medical treatment to family members. But in a small community like his, emergency workers may find themselves alone at the scene, or with a single partner, and there isn’t time to wait for someone else to arrive.

“I wasn’t getting help and I became an alcoholic and I turned violent because of my past trauma,” he said. “We can prevent that if the government provides us healing and support.”

The Makivik Corporation, which represents Inuit in negotiations with various levels of government, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The office of Quebec’s minister responsible for relations with First Nations and Inuit, Ian Lafrenière, directed questions to the Public Security Department. Public Security Minister François Bonnardel declined to comment for this story.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Feb. 26, 2023.

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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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