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Israel news: 5 Canadians killed, government confirms

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There have now been five Canadians confirmed killed amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, and Canadians in Lebanon are also now being advised to consider leaving, the federal government said Sunday.

The government of Canada has now confirmed the increased death toll — up from four dead as of Saturday — and officials continue to follow up on the cases of three other missing Canadians.

Global Affairs Canada’s assistant deputy minister for consular security and emergency management Julie Sunday made the announcement during a technical briefing in Ottawa, as a protest over the crisis was underway on Parliament Hill.

The latest confirmed casualty was previously included in the government’s tally of missing Canadians.

“It has always been a possibility that missing persons would be confirmed deceased… It is an extremely tragic outcome,” Sunday said. “Our thoughts are with the families in all of these cases.”

“We are very focused on addressing the cases of the three missing persons, who we continue to try to locate and bring back to safety in Canada.”

Last weekend, Hamas militants attacked Israel and took hostages, leading to a barrage of retaliatory air strikes in Gaza. Thousands of people have been killed, injured, and displaced as a result of the conflict.

Providing an update on the team of experts Canada sent to assist with hostage negotiation, while still not commenting on whether there are any Canadians among the hundreds of hostages, the assistant deputy minister said the group is currently working out of Tel Aviv to connect with counterparts.

“There’s a broad group of missing persons in Israel right now, and so there are many partners on the ground. I know our team has been — in addition to counterparts in Israel — has been in discussions also with the United States officials there who are working on these issues,” Sunday said.

“We are very much benefiting from the broader discussions, we are able to get information in real time, you know, face to face, which is really important to being able to action and try to resolve these cases.”

As of end of day Sunday, an estimated 1,000 Canadians and their families will have been repatriated from Israel to Athens via a Canadian Armed Forces military airlift operation that saw two flights a day shuttle those looking to leave out of the conflict zone.

Global Affairs Canada has responded to more than 800 inquiries in the last 24 hours, and approximately 4,200 inquiries since the beginning of the crisis.

WEST BANK, GAZA CHALLENGES PERSIST

There are currently more than 6,800 Canadians registered in Israel, and more than 450 in the West Bank and Gaza. Among these, the government is currently assisting more than 3,300 Canadians, permanent residents and their families, Sunday said.

As an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ground offensive in Gaza is “pretty close” to unfolding, civilians are being ordered to find a way out of the region.

While approximately 300 Canadians and their families continue to seek assistance departing Gaza, the federal government says it is still trying to find a safe window to facilitate their departure after Saturday’s plans to exit through Egypt fell through.

“Nobody got through that gate yesterday,” Sunday said, noting Canada remains “extremely hopeful” that work underway by allied countries and aid organizations will see a humanitarian corridor open.

“The situation remains extremely fluid and insecure,” Sunday said, noting the challenge in trying to seek assurances from Hamas, as well as the challenges communicating with those in Gaza given the impacted that downed electricity is having on telecommunications.

On Friday, consular staff called close to 50 families to inform them that while it remains unclear who may be permitted to pass, should a corridor open, it could be open for a very short window.

“We have emphasized that people need to ensure their own safety and security when they’re travelling, that they need to be prepared… and that should an opportunity arise that being close to that border would be a benefit,” Sunday said.

“But again, individuals are having to make really difficult decisions… We are not telling people to go straight to that border until we have an understanding that there will be an opening.”

Plans for ground transportation through Jordan are still being made for those in the West Bank, who the government says will be given more information “in the coming days.”

“We are ready to start a land transportation option as early as tomorrow. But it’s complicated,” Sunday said, going on to describe a tentative two-bus plan that would see one bus shuttle Canadians from Ramallah and across the West Bank, through Allenby Gate. From there, passengers would switch busses to be brought into Jordan.

NEW TRAVEL WARNING FOR LEBANON

In the briefing — now becoming a daily occurrence — officials from Global Affairs Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Department of National Defence spoke to the latest developments.

This included a new warning to the approximately 14,500 Canadian citizens and permanent residents registered in Lebanon: that Lebanon is becoming increasingly unstable and they should avoid all travel to the area along the Israel border, and consider leaving if they don’t need to be there.

Further, officials are strongly advising anyone considering travelling to avoid all non-essential travel to Lebanon due to “security risks.” This concern is based on activity at the border being reported in media, and military assessments of the impact of the conflict potentially spilling over.

“Whole of government planning is actively taking place to prepare for all possible scenarios,” Sunday said. “This is simply not the time to go there… The situation is volatile, and if you don’t need to be there you should consider leaving, while commercial means are still available.”

The government is also advising Canadians in Jordan about possible large scale protests in the area, and to avoid demonstrations and gatherings.

In the course of her visit through the region, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly has “engaged” with the Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and Qatari foreign ministers, as well as the commissioner general for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

 

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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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