After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unprecedented and explosive allegation that the Indian government had a hand in the June killing of Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Canada found itself at the centre of a geopolitical rift that has affected other international players with ties to India.
India has denied Trudeau’s allegations and since branded Canada a “safe haven for terrorists, extremists” and “anti-India activities.” It also accused Nijjar, who actively supported the push for an independent Sikh state in the Punjab region of India called Khalistan, of leading a militant separatist group. His supporters reject this claim.
Meanwhile, Canada’s allies in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, are weighing their next moves as the political fallout from Trudeau’s accusation continues.
The history of tensions surrounding the Khalistan movement in India and abroad goes back decades, but experts say Canada is seen as the country where the movement is the strongest, and as a result, has drawn sharp criticisms from India, especially in the face of Trudeau’s allegations that India was involved in Nijjar’s killing.
What is Khalistan? A look at the movement for an independent Sikh state
Featured VideoSome Sikhs have historically been seeking an independent Sikh homeland in northern India called Khalistan. Experts say the history of the movement is complex, emotional and evolving.
No consensus among Sikhs on independence
India raising concerns about what it calls “Sikh extremism” isn’t new, and neither is Canada’s response.
In 2012, India’s foreign minister raised the issue of “the revival of anti-India rhetoric in Canada” with then Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was visiting the country. While Harper said Canada was a supporter of a united India, he refused to silence peaceful pro-Khalistan discourse.
“We can’t interfere with the right of political freedom of expression,” Harper said, noting that the movement was marginal within the Indian diaspora in Canada.
Trudeau echoed Harper’s response when he was questioned about the presence of Sikh Khalistani militants in Canada at the G20 in New Delhi last month.
Trudeau walks past Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sept. 9 at the G20 summit in New Delhi, where he was questioned about Sikh Khalistani militants in Canada. He said Canada would ‘prevent violence and push back against hatred,’ but noted the actions of a few don’t represent the entire Sikh community. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
“We are always there to prevent violence and push back against hatred,” the prime minister said. But he also noted that the actions of a few do not represent the entire Sikh community in Canada.
Canada has the largest Sikh population outside of India, with about 770,000 people, or about 2.1 per cent of the country’s population. In other Five Eyes countries, Sikhs constitute less than one per cent of the population.
While Canada may have a comparatively large Sikh population, there’s no consensus within the community on the need for an independent Sikh state, according to Baljit Nagra, an associate professor of criminology specializing in race relations at the University of Ottawa.
“There is only a small portion of the community that supports Khalistan,” she said.
That support began growing in the 1980s following deadly anti-Sikh riots in India. That helped spur closer connections between the Khalistan movement in India and Canada, according to Satwinder Bains, the director of the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in B.C.
Bains says Canada’s focus on multiculturalism rather than assimilation has allowed Sikhs who immigrate here to retain their culture and maintain close ties to relatives and political movements back home, even during times of strife and unrest.
Canada’s connection to the Khalistan movement
Featured VideoThe National breaks down Canada’s connection to the movement calling for an independent Sikh state known as Khalistan and how it contributed to tensions between Canada and India even before Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed. Plus, CBC’s Salimah Shivji explains how the Khalistan movement resonates in India.
In the case of Sikh separatism, that has, at times, included sending money back home to support more militant arms of the Khalistan movement, she says.
Canadian Sikhs are also active in Canadian politics and have promoted their causes on the national political stage. That has sometimes helped elevate certain causes that India would prefer to ignore.
For instance, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who is Sikh, spent much of his early political career as an MP in Ontario lobbying the province to recognize India’s 1984 anti-Sikh riots as an act of genocide.
A motion condemning the riots as a genocide was passed in Ontario in 2017. In 2018, Singh, who had by then become the federal NDP leader, said the same should be done at the federal level. The federal government has so far not done this.
Khalistan supporters stomp on a cardboard cutout of Modi during a protest at the Consulate General of India in Toronto last month. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
India concerned about violent symbolism
During a recent visit to Washington, D.C., Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said violent acts by Sikh separatists have been “normalized in Canada in the name of freedom of speech.”
“We don’t think freedom of speech extends to incitement of violence, that’s a misuse of freedom; it’s not a defence of freedom,” he said.
Neilesh Bose, an associate professor of history at the University of Victoria, says India takes issue with the violent symbolism sometimes displayed by those in the separatist movement. For example, India’s foreign minister criticized Canada over a float in a June parade in Brampton, Ont., that portrayed the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards.
There have also been multiple protests outside Indian consulates in Canada this year that saw demonstrators burn Indian flags and stomp on cardboard cutouts of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Neilesh Bose, a South Asian history professor at the University of Victoria, says if Canada could address the extremism India sees as a threat, it could help calm India’s fears. (Submitted by Neilesh Bose)
”I think the threat posed to India is often exaggerated,” Bose said, “but India holds reasons to view the movement the way it does, especially given the longer history of the Khalistani movement and events such as the Air India bombing of 1985.”
Attempts within the Sikh diaspora to push for independence have been made through more legitimate channels such as referendums.
The pro-Khalistan organization Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), which India has designated a terrorist group, has organized multiple unofficial referendums in Canada and other countries asking if an independent Sikh homeland should be created in northern India.
The group says it intends to bring results to the United Nations to garner support for Sikh self-determination.
Though some experts say the referendums won’t ultimately result in any meaningful change, Rupinder K. Liddar, a PhD candidate in political science at McGill University in Montreal, says they’re a way to express political opinion and keep those in the Sikh separatist movement engaged.
Having an outlet for such opinions, even if it’s outside India, is seen as particularly important because, as many experts have noted, since Modi became prime minister in 2014, his government has tried to silence political dissent in general.
“There’s finally a place in which they feel safe to express their political opinions, which is not necessarily the case in Punjab,” Liddar said.
Reluctance to upset India
Though Canada’s Five Eyes allies say they’ve urged India to co-operate in the investigation into Nijjar’s death, the allegations come at a sensitive time in the world, when many countries don’t want to risk alienating India.
To that end, all of the other Five Eyes countries have been quicker than Canada to make public statements about keeping anti-Indian sentiments in check.
In July, an attack on the Indian consulate in San Francisco, including an arson attempt, prompted the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans to denounce it as a criminal offence.
Modi welcomes British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to the G20 summit on Sept. 9. According to Sunak, his government is working very closely with India’s to tackle what he calls ‘pro-Khalistani extremism’ in the U.K. (Getty Images)
During his visit to the G20 summit in India last month, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was working closely with the Indian government to tackle “pro-Khalistani extremism.”
To Liddar, such responses demonstrate that Western democracies are wary of damaging their valuable economic and geopolitical relationships with India.
“Part of speaking for or not speaking for this issue is being framed as supporting and not supporting the Indian government,” she said.
The University of Victoria’s Bose says that if Canada can continue its investigation into Nijjar’s killing while also opposing any elements of extremism India sees as a threat, “it would go a long way” to calm India’s fears.
“I think India might change their attitude,” he said.
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.
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.
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.
