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Israel-Hamas war: Update on Canada’s evacuation plans

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Two weeks into the Israel-Hamas war, the federal government is still trying to find ways to get Canadians out of Gaza, while evacuation flights out of Tel Aviv are starting to wind down.

On Friday, Global Affairs Canada and other government officials provided an update on the status of various evacuation efforts.

They also signalled that plans are being made to assist Canadians in Lebanon, should the conflict spill over.

Here’s what we know heading into the weekend.

ISRAEL FLIGHTS DOWN TO ONE A DAY

After conducting 16 flights out of Tel Aviv, airlifting Canadians to Athens for nine days straight, the Canadian government is indicating that these flights could soon end.

The Canadian Armed Forces says because of reduced demand, these shuttles have slowed from two flights per day to one, seeing one of the two Airbus CC-150 Polaris taken off duty.

There are three flights planned for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. After that, future flights remain undetermined as demand is “dwindling.”

As of Friday, Canada has helped nearly 1,600 Canadians their family members leave Israel via the Ben Gurion Airport. Those that have boarded these military flights have been responsible for covering the cost of their travel from Greece onward.

Canadian citizens waiting at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv to board one of a series of scheduled evacuation flights. (CTV News / Marley Parker)

“If you intend to leave Israel, I strongly recommend that you contact us and provide us with your information as soon as possible so that we can put you on one of these flights,” Global Affairs Canada’s assistant deputy minister for consular security and emergency management Julie Sunday told reporters Friday.

“If you’re given a seat on one of these flights, I urge you to take it.”

GAZA STRIP ‘EXTREMELY FLUID’

There is still no concrete plan to get Canadians out of Gaza, though with news of a potential pathway opening for humanitarian aid to get in from Egypt, federal officials are hopeful the situation will progress to a place where they can get people out.

“The situation remains extremely fluid, and while there have been positive signs, the Rafah border crossing remains closed for foreign nationals seeking to leave,” Sunday said.

“We are continuing to communicate directly with Canadians who wish to exit. We know they are facing extremely difficult conditions and we are doing everything we can to support them.”

If, and when a window for exits opens, it will likely be for a short period of time and require a massive multinational effort.

Sunday noted that with an estimated 430 Canadians registered with the government as being in Gaza, any evacuation effort would take considerable resources.

“Our mission in Cairo continues to engage with Egyptian authorities to ensure that any Canadians that can pass through the Rafah crossing will be transported to Cairo and onward to Canada.

“We are looking at how we can facilitate Canadians then getting from Cairo back to Canada, and we will likely do something very similar to what we had in Athens in terms of supporting their onward travel.

WEST BANK BUS DEPARTURES

So far, Canada has been able to conduct some limited assisted departures through the West Bank, seeing the exit of 33 passengers.

The majority of these individuals got out by bus on Monday, crossing from Ramallah through the Allenby Gate to Jordan.

A picture of a bus that Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly shared in a social media post about Canadians arriving in Jordan on Oct. 16, 2023. (Melanie Joly via X)

Sunday said Canada is planning for further transfers on Sunday and Monday.

“Our mission in Ramallah continues to be in direct contact with all Canadians in the West Bank who require assistance leaving,” Sunday said.

“We will be conducting further assisted departures based on need, and in line with the security situation on the ground as it continues to evolve.”

LEAVE LEBANON ASAP

After days of watching fighting intensify on the southern border with Israel and earlier cautions about it being the time to leave Lebanon, mid week Canada updated its travel advisory.

The federal government is now advising against all travel to that country, and planning to potentially begin evacuations.

“Canadians should not travel to Lebanon for any reason. For those Canadians who are already in Lebanon, we strongly advise that they seek commercial options to leave as soon as possible,” Sunday said.

The government estimates there are 14,500 Canadians registered in Lebanon, and to assist in a swift exit if needed, Global Affairs is asking all in the country to ensure they and their families have the necessary travel documents.

“People have longstanding ties, families. These are really difficult decisions to make, and we understand that, but our best advice is it’s time to come back to Canada,” Sunday said.

Officials said that cross-government planning is underway to prepare for “all possible scenarios,” including pre-positioning a rapid deployment team in the region.

Further, the Canadian Armed Forces is planning for potential non-combatant evacuation operations in Lebanon.

Maj.-Gen. Darcy Molstad, deputy commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command said military members have been stationed in Lebanon and Cyprus to prepare.

 

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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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