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Talismanic captain Atiba Hutchinson set for final appearance for Canada

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Canada captain Atiba Hutchinson calls an end to his distinguished playing career Sunday. He’s looking to leave with a trophy.

The 40-year-old midfielder has already said goodbye to his longtime Turkish club team, via a social media post this week saying: “Thank you Besiktas, forever in my heart.”

He will close his Canadian chapter at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas where the 47th-ranked Canadian men take on the 13th-ranked U.S. in the CONCACAF Nations League final. The winner lifts a cup and collects a cheque worth around US$1 million.

“This is going to be my last kick at it,” said Hutchinson, who was a steadying influence after coming off the bench in the 76th minute in Thursday’s 2-0 semifinal win over No. 58 Panama.

“(Sunday) is going to be my last time putting on that shirt, representing Canada,” he added. “It’s obviously a very big game I’m going to enjoy every moment of it.”

Hutchinson was 19 when he made his senior debut for Canada in January 2003 in a 4-0 loss to the U.S. He now holds the Canadian men’s record for appearances at 104.

“It’s been 20 years of representing Canada,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed all of it, every single moment of it getting together with the boys and playing the games we’ve played, travelling to so many different countries.

“It’s just been a great journey for me. I think it will really hit me a lot more (Sunday).”

Hutchinson said he’s had discussions with John Herdman, the 10th Canadian coach he has played under, about a future role with the program, but nothing has been decided.

Hutchinson has become a talisman and a role model for the Canadian men, a classy professional with no ego.

Herdman called him “probably the greatest Canadian football player not many people know about. That was the reality up until probably this (last) World Cup and people got to see him for who he really is.”

“He’s everything for the team. He’s everything for the country, he’s everything for the people, the players,” Herdman added at Saturday at the pre-match news conference. “And nothing for him. He wants nothing else but to see this country do well. And he’s willing to sacrifice for that as well.

“So it will be a privilege to spend (Sunday) night with him. Our gift to him will be to help him put his hands on that silverware. That would be a special moment.”

Hutchinson worked his way up the ranks and through Europe, building his club career starting in Scandinavia with Osters and Helsingborg in Sweden and FC Copenhagen in Denmark. He then joined Dutch side PSV Eindhoven in 2010 before moving to Turkey in 2013.

He captained Istanbul’s Besiktas, becoming a fan favourite known as the Octopus for his spindly legs and ability to hold onto the ball.

A father of three boys, Hutchinson said he chose the CONCACAF Nations League and not the Gold Cup that follows soon after as his swansong because his wife is expecting their fourth child.

He leaves the Canadian men in a good spot, saying the team has progressed farther than he ever thought it could during his career.

“I’m just happy at where we are as a team, how the future looks for this team, how much depth there is in Canada now,” he said. “The sky’s the limit for this team. We’re playing here for a trophy (Sunday) and we believe that this is a turning point for us. We’ll be continuing to be playing for trophies, qualifying for World Cups. That’s the new standard for us.

“It’s a great time in Canadian football and I think it will just continue to get better and better and bigger.”

Hutchinson and the Canadian men are after their first trophy since the 2000 Gold Cup. They also want to build on a World Cup qualifying journey that saw them finish first in CONCACAF.

“As I keep saying to the players, it’s about bringing the future to the now,” Herdman said after the Panama win. “We’ve got our eyes on (the World Cup in) 2026 and winning big matches there but the future’s now for us. We’ve got to take some steps to keep building that trust and confidence in our own ability.”

The Americans will be without midfielder Weston McKennie and fullback Sergino Dest, both suspended after being red-carded in the chippy 3-0 win over Mexico in the semifinal. Dest, who has 26 caps for the U.S., plays his club football for Barcelona while McKennie (44 caps) spent last season on loan to England’s Leeds United from Italy’s Juventus.

Herdman has downplayed expectations, repeatedly talking about the Canadian team’s lack of preparation ahead of the final four. He also noted how the American side has a huge edge when it comes to the number of players attached to clubs in Tier 1 leagues around the world.

“The U.S. have got a massive qualitative advantage over every team in CONCACAF at the moment,” he said.

“And then there’s seven million (support) staff they have and all the resources that they can put into their program,” he added. “So they’re the big dogs in CONCACAF. And rightly so. I think ourselves and Mexico are still hunting the big dog.”

The U.S. leads the all-time series over Canada with a 16-10-12 record.

“They’re a good team. They’re a good team as a team. With structure. Well-coached,” interim U.S. coach B.J. Callaghan said of Canada. “They have some amazing individual talented players as well.”

The Canadians have had success against the U.S. in past CONCACAF Nations League play. The Canadian men won 2-0 when they met in October 2019 at BMO Field with goals from Alphonso Davies and substitute Lucas Cavallini ending a 34-year, 17-match winless run for Canada against its North American rival.

The U.S. won the return match 4-1 in Orlando the next month to advance to the Nations League finals.

The teams have gone 1-1-1 in meeting since then, with Canada winning 2-0 last time out in World Cup qualifying play in January 2022 in Hamilton.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 17, 2023.

 

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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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