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Trudeau en route to Southeast Asia for summits aimed at deeper Indo-Pacific ties

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OKYO — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is en route to Southeast Asia for a series of meetings aimed at deepening Canada’s presence in the Indo-Pacific.

The Prime Minister’s Office says his main focuses include the economy, such as inflation and supply-chain issues, support for Ukraine and the environment.

Trudeau’s first stop will be the leaders’ summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. He is scheduled to arrive shortly after midnight on Saturday, Ottawa time.

On Saturday, Trudeau will take part in an hour-long commemoration of Canada’s 45 years of ties with the ASEAN bloc, including heads of government and state.

The 10-country bloc has some of the fastest economic growth on the planet, and started formal trade talks with Canada last year.

Wayne Farmer, head of the Canada-ASEAN Business Council, said that gives Ottawa an edge when many countries are jockeying for deeper ties in the region.

“That they selected Canada, given their limited bandwidth to negotiate … they must see something of interest in Canada to pursue,” he said, noting the booming economies are hungry for the commodities and infrastructure acumen that Canada can offer.

“They’re all having this bounce that you’re not seeing in the developed, Western world necessarily. So we need to be there, trading with them, supplying and buying from them — and also learning from them,” Farmer said.

“The fact that we’re showing up is good and important, and it does send a signal that we’re interested in the region.”

It hasn’t always been that way. After a speech this week unveiling part of her upcoming Indo-Pacific strategy, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly admitted that diplomats have told her about “the issue of Canada not always being a reliable partner” in the region.

“Sometimes we show up, and then we leave, and then we go back. That can’t be it,” Joly said during a question-and-answer session on Wednesday.

At the ASEAN summit, Trudeau is slated to attend a discussion on women in peace and security. He will likely visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, at what was a prison during the Khmer Rouge regime.

On Monday, the prime minister is scheduled to head to Indonesia for the G20 summit in Bali, a meeting of the world’s largest economies.

He is among the leaders of rich countries who are pressing their developing-country peers to further isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin for his invasion of Ukraine.

“It is clear that his barbaric war is jeopardizing our pandemic economic recovery, has amplified the global inflation crisis, and has worsened the world’s food and energy crisis. Its indirect impacts are making people hungrier, colder and poorer,” Trudeau wrote in a publication for the G20 Research Group at the University of Toronto.

“I am going to the Bali Summit with the objectives of holding Russia to account for its illegal war, demonstrating Canada’s unshakable belief in multilateral co-operation, and advancing global economic growth.”

Other G20 countries such as India, China, Cambodia and Thailand have abstained in UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia.

This year’s summit host, Indonesia, has stressed the importance of focusing on consensus instead of division. It has asked leaders to focus on shoring up health systems, and boosting food and energy security.

John Kirton, who leads the G20 Research Group, said it’s hard to separate those issues from the strain the Russian invasion is putting on global systems.

“This war is hurting the very emerging and developing countries whose support (Putin) needs to win,” said Kirton, who is anticipating efforts at the G20 to broaden a deal with Russia that has helped get Ukrainian grain to developing countries.

With the West pushing to isolate Russia and developing countries seeking help to recover from the pandemic, he said this summit faces severe challenges.

“The unprecedented divide will be bridged, so that the summit can get on to doing its regular work,” Kirton said.

Putin will not be attending the Bali summit, but it will include the first meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping as heads of state.

Following the G20, Trudeau will make a brief stop in Bangkok, Thailand, to meet with leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group.

The summit is focused on the removal of trade barriers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, as well as climate change.

Kirton warned that this might mean other countries pressure the U.S. to expand recent policies that offer tax credits for buying electric vehicles made in North America, a deal that benefits Canada but not Japan or South Korea.

Trudeau then heads to Tunisia for the Francophonie summit, a meeting of French-speaking countries that includes large swaths of Africa.

The prime minister will partake in roundtables on digital connectivity as well as the role of women and youth.

Yet politics may overshadow the agenda, with Canada having raised concerns about anti-democratic moves by the Tunisian government.

Just weeks ago, Trudeau said he wasn’t sure whether he’d attend the summit, and didn’t deny reports that Canada pushed to have it moved to another country.

Each summit will involve bilateral meetings between Trudeau and world leaders. His office has publicly confirmed a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, and an intent to meet for the first time in-person with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the G20.

The trip is not likely to involve major defence announcements, in part because of Canada’s limited military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.

The Canadian Forces are taking part in a UN mission to monitor various sanctions on North Korea, to prevent goods and fuel from being trafficked between boats. And Canada recently announced talks to share intelligence with Japan.

Yet last year, Canada was excluded from a security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States known as AUKUS.

Canada is also not part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, often dubbed “the Quad,” which Japan started in 2004 to meet with the U.S., Australia and India. The group has had increasingly frequent meetings as China asserts itself in the region.

Trade Minister Mary Ng is accompanying Trudeau for the Southeast Asia portion of the 10-day trip, while Joly will skip the APEC meeting in Thailand to lay the ground for Trudeau’s visit to the Francophonie summit.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 11, 2022.

 

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press

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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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