Leafs goaltender Joseph Woll better equipped to handle injury frustration

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — The mother thought her baby looked healthy when he was born 1.5 months early, but staff swiftly whisked him to the neonatal intensive care unit.

It was the last time Burcu Gokdeniz would see her baby alive. The doctor in charge told her that Umut Ali’s heart stopped after his health deteriorated unexpectedly.

Seeing her son wrapped in a shroud 10 days after he was born was the “worst moment” of her life, the 32-year-old e-commerce specialist told The Associated Press.

Gokdeniz is among hundreds of parents who have come forward seeking an investigation into the deaths of their children or other loved ones since Turkish prosecutors accused 47 doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers and other medical workers of neglect or malpractice in the deaths of 10 newborns since last year.

The medical workers say they made the best possible judgment calls while caring for the most delicate patients imaginable, and face criminal penalties for unwanted outcomes.

Shattered parents say they have lost trust in the system and the cases have prompted so much outrage that demonstrators staged protests in October outside hospitals where some of the deaths occurred, hurling stones at the buildings.

Prosecutors haven’t said how much the defendants allegedly earned. After the scandal emerged, at least 350 families petitioned prosecutors, the Health Ministry or the president’s office seeking an investigation into the deaths of their loved ones, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

The prosecution’s case

Prosecutors are demanding up to 583 years in prison for the main defendant, Dr. Firat Sari, who operated the neonatal intensive care units of several hospitals in Istanbul. Sari is charged with “establishing an organization with the aim of committing a crime,” “defrauding public institutions,” “forgery of official documents” and “homicide by negligence.”

Prosecutors say that the evidence clearly shows medical fraud for profit. An indictment issued this month accused the defendants of falsifying records, and placing patients in the neonatal care units of some private hospitals for prolonged and sometimes unnecessary treatments in facilities unprepared to treat them.

Turkey guarantees all citizens health care, and its public health system reimburses private hospitals that treat eligible patients. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party, in power since 2002, has promoted the expansion of private health care facilities to improve access in the country of 85 million people.

Years without a family, then a death

After years of fertility treatment, Ozan Eskici and his wife welcomed twins — a boy and a girl — to one of Sari’s hospitals in 2019. Although the babies initially appeared to be healthy, both were admitted to intensive care. The girl was discharged after 11 days, but the boy died 24 days later.

During questioning by prosecutors, Sari denied accusations that the babies were not given the proper care, that the neonatal units were understaffed or that his employees were not appropriately qualified, according to a 1,400-page indictment.

He told prosecutors: “Everything is in accordance with procedures.”

This week, a court in Istanbul approved the indictment — which includes hundreds of pages of transcripts of secretly taped recordings of telephone conversations between suspects — and scheduled the trial date for Nov. 18.

The way that the case has horrified the nation has left the defendants increasingly isolated.

Lawyer Ali Karaoglan said he and two other attorneys who represented Sari during the investigation have recently withdrawn from the case. And authorities have since revoked the licenses and closed nine of the 19 hospitals implicated in the scandal, including one owned by a former health minister.

The scandal has led main opposition party leader Ozgur Ozel to call for all hospitals involved to be seized by the state and nationalized. Erdogan said those responsible for the deaths would be severely punished but warned against placing all blame on the country’s health care system.

“We will not allow our health care community to be battered because of a few rotten apples,” Erdogan said, calling the alleged culprits “a gang of people devoid of humanity.”

“This gang … committed such despicable atrocities by exploiting the facilities provided by our state to ensure citizens with higher quality and more accessible, affordable healthcare,” Erdogan said.

He added: “Those who commit such barbarism will be held accountable before the law in the most severe way for their crimes. As the president, I will continue to follow this issue personally to ensure that these killers, who played with the lives of innocent babies for financial gain, never see the light of day again.”

No more trust in the system

Gokdeniz, who gave birth in 2020, said she trusted Sari and accepted her son’s death as natural until she watched the scandal unfold in TV news and on social media.

“It all started to fall into place like dominoes,” she said.

Eskici, too, had placed complete trust in Sari, whose assurances he now views as cruel deceptions.

“The sentences he told me are in front of my eyes like it was yesterday,” he said.

Sibel Kosal, who lost her baby daughter Zeynep at a private hospital in 2017, is also seeking answers. She says the scandal has shattered her trust in the health care system and left her in constant fear for her surviving children.

“They have ruined a dad and a mom,” she said.

Kosal pleaded to the authorities to take immediate action.

“Don’t let babies die, don’t let mothers cry,” she said. “We want a livable world, one where our children are safe.”

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Badendieck reported from Hamburg, Germany.

A popular park in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland remains closed due to damage from an atmospheric river weather system that drenched the province’s south coast, triggering a mudslide and local flooding that killed three people.

The Environment Ministry says the storm that rolled over the region for three days starting on Oct. 18 left a trail of damage at Golden Ears Provincial Park, north of Maple Ridge.

A statement from the ministry says the province hopes to be able to reopen a portion of the park this fall, but the exact timeline is not yet clear.

It says park staff are working with engineers to assess the damage with an immediate focus on clearing plugged culverts and repairing roadways.

Nearby Coquitlam was among the hardest-hit areas as the atmospheric river dumped more than 250 millimetres of rain on the community that weekend.

An advisory posted to the park’s website after the storm says it was “closed until further notice.”

The ministry suggests that anyone who wants to visit the park should check the Golden Ears website for updates.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 31, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — With just days before the presidential election, Latino voters are facing a barrage of targeted ads in Spanish and a new source of political messaging in the artificial intelligence age: chatbots generating unfounded claims in Spanish about voting rights.

AI models are producing a stream of election-related falsehoods in Spanish more frequently than in English, muddying the quality of election-related information for one of the nation’s fastest-growing and increasingly influential voting blocs, according to an analysis by two nonprofit newsrooms.

Voting rights groups worry AI models may deepen information disparities for Spanish-speaking voters, who are being heavily courted by Democrats and Republicans up and down the ballot.

Vice President Kamala Harris will hold a rally Thursday in Las Vegas featuring singer Jennifer Lopez and Mexican band Maná. Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, held an event Tuesday in a Hispanic region of Pennsylvania, just two days after fallout from insulting comments made by a speaker about Puerto Rico at a New York rally.

The two organizations, Proof News and Factchequeado, collaborated with the Science, Technology and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study to test how popular AI models responded to specific prompts in the run-up to Election Day on Nov. 5, and rated the answers.

More than half of the elections-related responses generated in Spanish contained incorrect information, as compared to 43% of responses in English, they found.

Meta’s model Llama 3, which has powered the AI assistant inside WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, was among those that fared the worst in the test, getting nearly two-thirds of all responses wrong in Spanish, compared to roughly half in English.

For example, Meta’s AI botched a response to a question about what it means if someone is a “federal only” voter. In Arizona, such voters did not provide the state with proof of citizenship — generally because they registered with a form that didn’t require it — and are only eligible to vote in presidential and congressional elections. Meta’s AI model, however, falsely responded by saying that “federal only” voters are people who live in U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico or Guam, who cannot vote in presidential elections.

In response to the same question, Anthropic’s Claude model directed the user to contact election authorities in “your country or region,” like Mexico and Venezuela.

Google’s AI model Gemini also made mistakes. When it was asked to define the Electoral College, Gemini responded with a nonsensical answer about issues with “manipulating the vote.”

Meta spokesman Tracy Clayton said Llama 3 was meant to be used by developers to build other products, and added that Meta was training its models on safety and responsibility guidelines to lower the likelihood that they share inaccurate responses about voting.

Anthropic’s head of policy and enforcement, Alex Sanderford, said the company had made changes to better address Spanish-language queries that should redirect users to authoritative sources on voting-related issues. Google did not respond to requests for comment.

Voting rights advocates have been warning for months that Spanish-speaking voters are facing an onslaught of misinformation from online sources and AI models. The new analysis provides further evidence that voters must be careful about where they get election information, said Lydia Guzman, who leads a voter advocacy campaign at Chicanos Por La Causa.

“It’s important for every voter to do proper research and not just at one entity, at several, to see together the right information and ask credible organizations for the right information,” Guzman said.

Trained on vast troves of material pulled from the internet, large language models provide AI-generated answers, but are still prone to producing illogical responses. Even if Spanish-speaking voters are not using chatbots, they might encounter AI models when using tools, apps or websites that rely on them.

Such inaccuracies could have a greater impact in states with large Hispanic populations, such as Arizona, Nevada, Florida and California.

Nearly one-third of all eligible voters in California, for example, are Latino, and one in five of Latino eligible voters only speak Spanish, the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute found.

Rommell Lopez, a California paralegal, sees himself as an independent thinker who has multiple social media accounts and uses OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. When trying to verify unfounded claims that immigrants ate pets, he said he encountered a bewildering number of different responses online, some AI-generated. In the end, he said he relied on his common sense.

“We can trust technology, but not 100 percent,” said Lopez, 46, of Los Angeles. “At the end of the day they’re machines.”

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Salomon reported from Miami. Associated Press writer Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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This story is part of an Associated Press series, “The AI Campaign,” exploring the influence of artificial intelligence in the 2024 election cycle.

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The Associated Press receives financial assistance from the Omidyar Network to support coverage of artificial intelligence and its impact on society. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.