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Marco Mendicino adds to the Liberal government’s paperwork problems

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We might still get around to having a real conversation in this country about why and how the Correctional Service of Canada decided to transfer Paul Bernardo to a medium-security facility.

But it’s increasingly unclear that Marco Mendicino will still be the public safety minister if or when that conversation happens.

In the meantime, the Conservative leader’s decision to demand the minister’s resignation on Wednesday likely only ensures that Mendicino remains in place until a cabinet shuffle expected sometime later this summer.

The demand for Mendicino’s exit was prompted by the CBC’s report that staff in the minister’s office were aware of Paul Bernardo’s pending transfer as far back as March 2. Subsequent reporting confirmed that the Prime Minister’s Office was also made aware in March and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was himself briefed on the transfer on May 29.

According to the version of events presented by the government, the minister’s staff did not feel it necessary to tell him about the transfer of one of Canada’s most notorious murderers until May 30, a day after the move was made and a day after Trudeau was briefed.

It’s not obvious why Mendicino’s advisers would keep their advance notice to themselves.

According to the minister’s spokesperson, the office spent those weeks exploring whether the minister had any discretion to overturn the CSC’s decision — and determined or decided that no such option existed. That is an important point that should be part of any debate about prison transfers.

But that apparent lack of options doesn’t mean there was no reason to tell the minister about something that he inevitably would be asked about by reporters anyway.

 

Poilievre, Mendicino trade heated words over Bernardo prison transfer

 

During an intense exchange in question period, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre asked Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino about what he knew of Paul Bernardo’s transfer to a medium security prison. Poilievre has called on the minister to resign.

And if they really did neglect to alert the minister to Bernardo’s impending transfer, it’s still puzzling that they also apparently failed to keep him from describing the transfer as “shocking” when he released a statement on June 2. That’s not the word to use when, conceivably, you could have known about the event in question for three months.

In that same statement, Mendicino expressed concern with how the transfer was handled and said he would be speaking to the CSC commissioner directly. But it’s now obvious that Mendicino could have done that before the transfer occurred.

Mendicino has now issued a new directive that stipulates, in part, that the CSC must “formally and directly” notify the minister when a dangerous or high-profile offender is transferred. That only reinforces the fact that something went terribly wrong here.

Is a minister about to lose his job?

Despite the highly emotional and traumatic subject matter, this episode might still be marked down as only an unfortunate breakdown — except that it’s difficult to view this latest controversy as an isolated incident, either for the minister or this government.

The Conservatives presented their own lengthy list of Mendicino’s mishaps on Wednesday. And while some of the items on that list may have been unfairly framed, Mendicino’s time at public safety has also been much messier than it needed to be.

A year ago, he talked himself into trouble when he suggested that the advice of law enforcement agencies had led the federal cabinet to invoke the Emergencies Act. A lack of clarity about what that advice entailed eventually culminated in an earlier round of demands for Mendicino’s resignation.

Several months later, Mendicino’s gun control legislation turned into an unnecessary problem for the government. After it passed comfortably at second reading, the Liberals decided to try to amend the bill while it was at committee.

Pandemonium ensued and the government ultimately was compelled to back down. More than a year after C-21 was first introduced, it is still winding its way through the Senate.

In the media realm, three similar things in a row constitutes a trend — and so now Mendicino will be described as “embattled” or “beleaguered.”

If it still seems unlikely that Mendicino will resign or be fired, that’s only because a government almost never gains anything from such transactions. If anything, the resignation of a minister usually only confirms that something went sideways. And when the Official Opposition is demanding someone’s resignation, a government has all the more reason to deprive their rivals of a victory.

A prime minister is more likely to hold on and wait for the next cabinet shuffle, at which point a minister can be given a different portfolio (or dropped entirely) as part of a series of moves. For that reason, the consequences flowing from this latest episode might not become apparent until the prime minister — as expected — resets his cabinet this summer.

Another problem with the flow of information

But the government’s problems go beyond Mendicino and questions about the corrections system. As NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh noted on Wednesday, this is not the first paperwork-related breakdown for the Liberals.

“I think this is a problem that’s bigger than just a minister resigning,” Singh told reporters. “There’s a culture in this government where multiple ministers have had serious allegations of not properly reading emails.”

In April, International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan had to admit he had missed emails that might have alerted him to the fact that a senator was distributing unauthorized travel documents. And one of the major findings in David Johnston’s report on foreign interference was that a key memo from CSIS failed to reach Bill Blair, Mendicino’s predecessor as public safety minister.

 

Poilievre calls for Mendicino to resign

 

Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre calls for Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino to resign following a CBC News exclusive that says staff in the minister’s office were notified of Paul Bernardo’s prison transfer months in advance.

One such incident looks unfortunate. Two seems sloppy. Three suggests there might be a real problem.

A year ago, this government was struggling to gain control over a series of breakdowns in service delivery — things like issuing passports. The ministers involved eventually got their departments back on track but the government came away from that experience with the sense that it needed to put a renewed focus on basic competence — on simply making sure the machinery of government runs smoothly.

The last few months suggest that the flow of information within government might be as big a problem now as passports used to be.

There is, as always, some chance that these are merely isolated incidents, that there won’t soon be another example to add to this list of email-induced controversies. But the Liberals probably can’t afford to assume that.

Even if there is no new public safety minister come the fall, the government has much more to fear from very basic — and damning — questions about its competence.

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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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