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Liberals, Conservatives take 2 seats apiece in 4 federal byelections

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Voters in four federal ridings are sticking with the status quo, returning two Liberals and two Conservatives to Parliament after byelections in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.

CBC News projects Liberals Ben Carr in Winnipeg South Centre and Anna Gainey in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount and Conservatives Arpan Khanna in Oxford and Branden Leslie in Portage-Lisgar will win their respective races.

That means the party standings in the House of Commons are unchanged after Monday’s vote.

The four seats in question have long been considered safe for the parties that currently hold them.

If any of these ridings had changed hands, it would have been a major upset.

But the results may serve as a barometer reading on how voters in four geographically diverse ridings perceive the current state of affairs and the leaders of Canada’s two major political parties.

Liberal candidates defy polls to win 2 seats

While national polls say support for the Liberal government has slumped after eight years in power, Trudeau’s candidates handily won in two seats — and came closer than expected in a third.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s candidate in the rural Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar beat back a challenge from Maxime Bernier, the leader of the far-right People’s Party, but the Conservative contender, Damir Stipanovic, in a Winnipeg-area seat that has gone Tory before floundered in Monday’s vote.

The result in Oxford, a southwestern Ontario riding near London, was also closer than some Conservative party operatives had expected with Liberal candidate David Hilderley registering a vote share not seen by that party in a long time.

Conservative candidate Arpan Khanna is pictured on a stage at a victory night party.
Conservative candidate Arpan Khanna is pictured at his victory party in the southwestern Ontario riding of Oxford. Khanna previously ran for the party in Brampton, Ont. (Isha Bhargava/CBC News)

As of 12:50 a.m. ET, Khanna had 42.5 per cent of the vote compared to 36.5 per cent for Hilderley.

The seat has had a conservative-leaning MP for the last 70 years except for a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when the right-of-centre vote was split between the Progressive Conservative and Reform/Canadian Alliance parties.

Tory who stepped down backed Liberal candidate

Longtime Conservative MP Dave MacKenzie triggered the byelection when he stepped down in January.

His daughter Deb Tait ran for the party’s nomination and lost to Khanna, a lawyer who previously ran for the party in Brampton, Ont. — a result that prompted accusations by Tait of wrongdoing, which the party has denied.

Tait, a Woodstock city-county councillor, claimed the party favoured her rival and she raised questions about voter ID verification during the nomination race.

In an unusual move, MacKenzie and Tait endorsed Hilderley, a retired principal and real estate agent, over Khanna, who has been called a “parachute candidate” for his tenuous connection to the riding.

The party infighting ultimately didn’t cost the Conservatives the seat — but a sizeable swing to the Liberals in a long-held seat may prompt some soul-searching at Tory headquarters.

Pedestrians standing at a street light in NDG-Westmount, Montreal. They're surrounded by campaign signs
There were 10 candidates on the ballot in the federal riding of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Westmount in Montreal. (CBC)

“One thing is clear — people believe in Pierre Poilievre’s positive vision for our country. We need more freedom in Canada,” Khanna said in his victory speech.

“For the farmer who’s putting food on our tables but is having trouble putting food on his own table because of the carbon tax, for the senior who’s on a fixed pension struggling to make ends meet, we hear you and I’ll fight for you every single day,” Khanna said.

The Liberal candidates in two party strongholds in Manitoba and Quebec have also won their respective seats and so too has a Conservative in rural Manitoba, CBC News projects.

Maxime Bernier is pictured outside a courthouse in Winnipeg.
Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, speaks to reporters in Winnipeg on May 16, 2023 after appearing in court and being fined $2,000 for breaking COVID-19 restrictions in Manitoba in 2021. (Steve Lambert/Canadian Press)

Voters in the Montreal-area riding of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Westmount have elected Liberal Anna Gainey to Parliament.

The result is not unexpected given that the seat is among the safest Liberal ridings in the country.

As of 11:55 p.m. ET, Gainey had roughly 50 per cent of the vote — about the same as what former cabinet minister and astronaut Marc Garneau fetched in the 2021 election.

While it’s considered a Liberal stronghold, many anglophones in the riding were angered by the government’s recent overhaul of the Official Languages Act.

Gainey is a personal friend of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and previously served as the party’s president. Given those close ties, Gainey is a contender for a cabinet post in a future shuffle.

Gainey beat Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault, a political neophyte who was elected along with MP Elizabeth May last year to lead the party. Pedneault was poised to finish fourth.

Tory on track to defeat Maxime Bernier in Portage-Lisgar

Further west, voters in the Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar have elected Conservative Branden Leslie to the House of Commons, CBC News projects.

Leslie had a commanding 65 per cent of the vote cast as of 12:55 a.m. ET — a tally that suggests he’s likely to trounce his main opponent, People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier.

The former Quebec MP parachuted into the riding to try to win his party’s first seat.

That effort appears to have failed with voters choosing Leslie, a former political staffer who worked for a grain farmers’ advocacy group, instead.

Conservative candidate Branden Leslie is seen at his victory party in the rural Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar.
Conservative candidate Branden Leslie is seen at his victory party in the rural Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar. (Ian Froese/CBC News)

Bernier chose to run in the riding because it’s one where the People’s Party performed best in the COVID-era 2021 federal election. The party’s electoral future is in question after Bernier’s poor showing.

Despite the lopsided loss, Bernier vowed to run again in the riding in the next general election.

“I’ll be back here,” he said in an interview with CBC News at his election watch party.

“It’s the beginning of a quiet, peaceful, commonsense revolution and you don’t do that in one election,” he said.

“For me, the most important thing is to grow our support and that’s happening and I will build from there for the next election.”

Bernier said the People’s Party is “the only national political party thinking about important issues” like relitigating the legal status of abortion, stopping what he calls “toxic transgender ideology,” and ending the country’s overreaction to climate change.

“Our opponent and the establishment try to say, ‘Oh no, those issues are settled.’ Well, they’re not,” he said.

Leslie and Bernier traded barbs throughout the campaign. Bernier has called his opponent a “fake” conservative. Leslie, in turn, has called Bernier “an opportunist from Quebec who will say or do anything he thinks people want to hear.”

To take on the far-right Bernier, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre visited the riding and used rhetoric targeting the World Economic Forum — an international organization that has become a focus of many right-wing conspiracy theories online — during a stump speech.

The riding, long held by former interim Conservative leader Candice Bergen, is among the safest Conservative seats in the country.

Liberal Ben Carr takes Winnipeg South Centre

Also in Manitoba, voters have returned school principal and former political staffer Ben Carr to represent Winnipeg South Centre the House of Commons, CBC News projects.

Carr was running to replace his late father, Jim, who died of cancer in December.

The urban riding has been in the Liberal win column for decades — except for a four-year gap period after the 2011 election that produced a Conservative majority.

As of 12:50 a.m., Carr had about half of the vote — roughly six points better than what his father achieved in the 2021 election.

 

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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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