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K’naan got tired of the spotlight. So he stepped behind the camera for his debut film

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TORONTO – K’naan Warsame shot to international stardom in the late aughts with his smash hit “Wavin’ Flag.” Not long after, he waved goodbye to the limelight.

“I don’t think at the time that I was cut out for that kind of intensity,” the Somali-Canadian rapper and singer says of the chart-topper, which soared beyond airwaves to become Coca-Cola’s promotional anthem for the 2010 World Cup and spurred remixes by stars including will.i.am and David Guetta.

“I still really appreciated the experience and all of that, but it was nuts. It was a lot,”Warsame says.

After dropping his 2012 album “Country, God or the Girl,” he decided to take a step back from the music business. He says he felt drained by the demands of the album release cycle.

“I’ve probably made two albums worth of music since that time, but I just haven’t released it because I lost the energy for putting music out. It just takes so much to be trying to crack through the noise and be like, ‘I’ve got something to hear!” the 46-year-old says on a video call from his New York apartment.

“I want whatever I’m doing for now to be about the work itself and less so about my own identity and history.”

Warsame says he’s spent the last decade creating things that don’t require him to be the centre of attention. One of them is his directorial debut “Mother Mother,” which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival Friday.

The film centres on Qalifo, a widower portrayed by Maan Youssouf Ahmed, and her college-age son Asad, played by Elmi Rashid Elmi, who manage a camel farm in rural Somalia. When Asad learns that his girlfriend has been seeing Liban, an American visitor played by Hassan Najib, tensions escalate into a confrontation that alters the course of their lives.

Warsame says he wrote the movie’s script in October 2020 as an homage to his aunt Qalifo, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The main character is loosely based on her.

“As I was dealing with these challenging last months of her life, I was putting her through a challenge in a fictional landscape so I could spend more time with her.”

His aunt died just as filming began in northern Kenya.

Warsame, who has long drawn musical inspiration from his war-torn homeland, says the film is also a tribute to Somali mothers.

“Our mothers are very tough, very loving, very powerful people. You meet any Somali and you talk about a Somali woman or Somali mother, there’s an immediate recognition of what that is,” he says.

“This movie tries to pull back the curtain on that specific and unusual quality to the Somali woman.”

Warsame says he first got the filmmaking bug in 2013 when he did a month-long stint at the Sundance Institute’s annual directors and screenwriters labs in Utah.

“I was trying to see if I could tell stories or evoke a feeling through the camera, the way I could do with words and music.”

He says the experience marked a “big shift” for him creatively and he fell in love with the idea of an entire team working together to tell one story.

“It was a less lonely way to work. You just feel like people are like little ants moving a big thing together.”

In 2016, HBO ordered “Mogadishu, Minnesota,” a family drama pilot about the Somali community in Minneapolis written, directed and executive produced by Warsame and executive produced by “The Hurt Locker” filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow. The network announced in 2017 it was not moving ahead with the pilot.

Warsame says he decided to pull the plug on the show after it got swept up in controversy over its subject matter.

“This was before any kind of show was making anything that had to do with complex topics involving Muslims and immigration. The first of something always has a lot more challenges to crack through,” he says.

“I think people were so afraid because there was no precedent for somebody talking about the Somali experience, and more broadly, the Black African Islamic experience.”

Warsame says he opted to wait and make other things rather than move forward with a show “that people were watching with suspicion, not openness.”

He notes he picked up many tools while filming “Mother Mother”— from a deeper understanding of the pacing of a story to the intention behind cinematography — that he can apply to his “next thing.” But he has “no idea” what that thing will be.

He released a track last year called “Refugee,” earning a Special Merit Award from the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards. A new song, “I Come From,” plays during his film’s closing credits. But he can’t confirm whether a new album is in the works.

“I’ve never been this tired in my whole life. I’ve been non-stop,” he says, noting he only wrapped “Mother Mother” in August.

“I’m sure there’s something already going in the back of my head. I do want to make another little movie. I’m not really that interested in big things. I like the little kind of guy, the little movies. I have some others in mind,” he adds.

“But music is always there, so we’ll see what happens.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 6, 2024.

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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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