Q&A: Author Clare Hammond reveals how railways made and broke Myanmar | Canada News Media
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Q&A: Author Clare Hammond reveals how railways made and broke Myanmar

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BANGKOK (AP) — For three months in 2016, a British journalist working in Myanmar traveled across the Southeast Asian country on trains with a mission to find out where they led, who built them, and why.

Clare Hammond arrived in Myanmar during a period of hope amid a transition to civilian rule, as Aung San Suu Kyi was coming to power after her decades of struggle against military rule.

Hammond recounts her travels in “On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar,” published in June, which began after she came across a map showing a far more extensive railway network than she had anticipated.

The rails carried troops and supplies deep into Myanmar’s interior, first on behalf of the British and later the Myanmar military. Following these tracks, Hammond uses the railways as a lens to understand the recent troubled history of Myanmar, formerly Burma.

As Hammond confronts Myanmar’s successive rulers’ records of coerced labor, environmental degradation, and repression, she also grapples with the promise and limitations of Myanmar’s short period of democratization — which the Myanmar military brought to an end when it seized power in February 2021.

Now the country is mired in civil war after nonviolent protests against the takeover segued into a nationwide armed resistance.

The Associated Press asked Hammond to explore what her time traveling on Myanmar’s trains reveals about the country’s past, present and future.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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AP: Did the railroads achieve the military’s goals?

HAMMOND: Before they built the railways and the attendant massive military expansion that took place, many parts of the country were not really controlled by the state. They were controlled by various different ethnic armed groups, and they weren’t really connected to the central Burmese state.

After the railways were built, those parts of the country were tied much more closely to the central Burmese state. So broadly, in military terms, I think that probably is considered a success.

Obviously, it wasn’t successful for the people, who suffered because of it.

AP: You write about public memory of how the armed forces became so powerful. How do the railroads come into play?

HAMMOND: Yes, it was a strategy. It was no coincidence that the stories that people told me all across the country were so similar to one another.

I think they built these railways purposefully to strengthen themselves. I think the interesting parallel that we could make with what the British did as well was that there was this kind of element of deception — of propaganda.

In all official documents and media reports and so on, they talked about how what they were doing was for the people. It was to develop the nation. It was to bring in modernity. It would help rural people bring their produce to market. That’s what a lot of the British railway reports focused on as well: the local economy.

But really these projects were — like the colonial railways — tools of violent military expansion. The infrastructure that was built was the infrastructure of occupation.

AP: At different points in your journey, you seem to be hinting at the imminent unraveling of civilian rule. Was it inevitable?

HAMMOND: I see it not so much as the unraveling of civilian rule, as a step that is perhaps inevitable on the path to ending military rule.

During those years, the military had designed a system that worked for itself. The military had written the constitution and designed the way that parliament would work. It had control over certain ministries and it also had kept certain parts of the economy for itself.

I saw a growing discontent and growing realization that this wasn’t going to work for Myanmar. There was this increasing push-back from the civilian government and from elements of civil society against the systems that the military put in place.

The military was refusing to budge because it had dedicated all of this time to building itself into this position of power. So, something had to give.

AP: Was there anything from this train journey that gave you hope about Myanmar’s future?

HAMMOND: I was traveling along the railways that the military built, and so I was traveling through places that were under military control. Just beyond these places, everywhere I went, community life was thriving.

I go beyond the edge of the railway network and find this incredible group of people. These are Karenni (ethnic minority) armed groups, and they’ve built for themselves everything they need.

Since the coup, they’ve been at the forefront of the revolution. They’ve started putting in place local governance systems that other parts of the borderlands are learning from, and people are talking to each other and sharing ways of governance. In a lot of the borderlands, they govern their own land and resources brilliantly. There’s a huge amount of knowledge about how to govern land and resources in ways that work for people all over the country.

The problem is that people haven’t been able to do that because of the British colonial expansion and then the expansion of Myanmar’s military. But the ideas are there, and now, as the revolution’s territorial gains increase, I think there is hope of a different type of future for Myanmar.

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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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