New Alberta Child and Youth Advocate report details 'alarming' deaths of 15 youth

Anna Junker - Edmonton Journal

The deaths of 15 youth over a six-month span are “extremely troublesome,” Alberta’s Child and Youth Advocate says in a new report.

The report, published Wednesday by Terri Pelton, highlights the need for “urgent action” to address service-delivery gaps following the deaths of 15 young people between the ages of six and 19. Twelve were Indigenous and nine died related to drug toxicity — with one who began using substances at the age of seven.

Twelve youth were receiving child intervention services at the time of their deaths, and three within the previous two years.

According to the report, many of the children and youth had complex needs that required cross-system support, and in some circumstances, the services didn’t meet their needs or were not available.

“Many young people with complex needs are not receiving adequate supports and that must be rectified,” said Pelton in a news release. “We recognize some promising new initiatives are being developed; however, in the meantime, we need immediate action to address these service gaps and create better outcomes for these children and youth.”

Rodney

One of the 15 children whose deaths are described in the report is six-year-old Rodney (all names are pseudonyms for privacy reasons). He is described as a “little gentleman” who was loving and kind. He loved riding horses and wanted to be a cowboy and firefighter when he grew up. Growing up, he witnessed escalating family violence, substance use by his parents, and mental health concerns.

The advocate found, at times, he did not have his basic needs met and his family had a number of brief involvements with child intervention services. As a result, Rodney was often staying with relatives.

During a family visit to their First Nation community, Rodney died in a house fire.

Gemma

Gemma is described as a kind, confident transgender First Nation woman who loved fashion, modelling, and makeup. She began to openly identify as female when she was 12 years old.

She was placed in a group home for four years. While there, the advocate found group care staff was accepting but continued to use male pronouns when referring to her. She was then moved to another group home in her First Nation community.

A week after her 18th birthday, Gemma overdosed. She died in hospital with her family at her side.

Recommendations

Pelton is recommending the ministries of health, education, children’s services, community and social services and justice and solicitor general “develop and publicly report on a coordinated action plan to address service gaps for young people with complex needs while longer-term initiatives are under development.”

The plan should also include targets and milestones that meet the immediate needs of the youth.

The Child and Youth Advocate also previously recommended the province develop and implement a youth-specific opioid and substance-use strategy. To date, no progress on the recommendation has been made, Pelton said.

In a statement, Children’s Services spokesman NOT THE MINISTER 

Dan Laville said the department will work with its partners to consider the advocate’s latest recommendation, while longer-term initiatives remain under development.

Laville added several initiatives are underway to improve access for youth and young adults to mental health and addiction services, including new funding and a partnership between Children’s Services, Alberta Health and Alberta Health Services to expand the Virtual Opioid Dependency Program.

He added opioid and substance use training is mandatory for child intervention practitioners.

“With an increase of opioid and substance use, we recognized a need to provide training to staff that focuses on appropriate responses and the tools they need,” Laville said. “We will not stop in our work to make a meaningful difference. We are committed to continuously improving our system to support the safety and well-being of children receiving child intervention services.”

However, Opposition NDP children’s services critic Rakhi Pancholi said there is no reason the UCP government should not have addressed the call for an opioid and substance-use strategy by now.

“This distracted government is costing children and young people their lives, and we need someone who is focused on taking these important recommendations seriously,” Pancholi said in a statement.

Related 

New Alberta child and youth advocate sworn in

Final report of Alberta child and youth advocate calls for more accountability and co-ordination amid rising deaths

Stunning visuals show lightning crackling around the eye of Hurricane Ian as it sweeps over the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida

insider@insider.com (Cheryl Teh) - Tuesday

Footage from the GOES-16 satellite showed bolts of crackling purple lightning around the eye of Hurricane Ian. Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (CIRA/CSU & NOAA).

© Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (CIRA/CSU & NOAA).

Satellite imagery showed the eye of Hurricane Ian as it passed over Cuba.

Also seen in the satellite footage was crackling purple bolts of lightning.

The hurricane is expected to strike Florida's Gulf coast on Wednesday.

Stark satellite footage of Hurricane Ian as it tears over the Gulf of Mexico shows its sheer scale — and the lightning crackling near the eye of the storm.

Footage of the hurricane was picked up by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-16 satellite on Tuesday.

A clip that tracked the hurricane's progress from 9.25 to 11.12 a.m. EST showed it swirling over the Gulf of Mexico. The satellite also picked up numerous bolts of lightning — represented in the clip with purple flashes — around the storm's clear eye.



Hurricane Ian is barreling toward Florida, prompting advice from Gov. Ron DeSantis for people to evacuate or seek shelter as soon as possible. The storm left Cuba's power grid decimated after hitting the country on Tuesday.

Related video: Key Changes To Hurricane Ian Forecast Ahead Of Florida Strike
Duration 1:08
View on Watch

The Weather Channel



Hurricane Ian barrels towards Florida as Category 3 storm CNN

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the hurricane is expected to make landfall on Wednesday and could become a Category Four storm by the time it hits. The hurricane grew in strength from a tropical storm to a Category 3 hurricane within a single day, a phenomenon that research suggests is becoming more common as global temperatures rise.

According to the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Ian is likely to cause a "life-threatening storm surge" and "catastrophic winds and flooding in the Florida peninsula."

"On the forecast track, the center of Ian is expected to pass west of the Florida Keys within the next few hours, and approach the west coast of Florida within the hurricane warning area on Wednesday," read the National Hurricane Center's public advisory on Tuesday night.

"The center of Ian is forecast to move over central Florida Wednesday night and Thursday morning and emerge over the western Atlantic by late Thursday," the advisory read.

TAX CHURCHES

Churches defend clergy loophole in child sex abuse reporting

By JASON DEAREN and MICHAEL REZENDES, Associated Press - Tuesday

 LONG READ

It was a frigid Sunday evening at the Catholic Newman Center in Salt Lake City when the priest warned parishioners who had gathered after Mass that their right to private confessions was in jeopardy.


FILE - The angel Moroni statue atop the Salt Lake Temple is silhouetted against a cloud-covered sky, at Temple Square in Salt Lake City on Feb. 6, 2013. 

(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)© Provided by Associated Press

A new law would break that sacred bond, the priest said, and directed the parishioners to sign a one-page form letter on their way out. “I/We Oppose HB90,” began the letter, stacked next to pre-addressed envelopes. “HB90 is an improper interference of the government into the practice of religion in Utah.”


FILE - Republican Rep. Merrill Nelson speaks during a special session at the Utah State Capitol, April 18, 2018, in Salt Lake City. 

(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

In the following days of February 2020, Utah’s Catholic diocese, which oversees dozens of churches, says it collected some 9,000 signed letters from parishioners and sent them to state Rep. Angela Romero, a Democrat who had been working on the bill as part of her campaign against child sexual abuse. HB90 targeted Utah’s “clergy-penitent privilege,” a law similar to those in many states that exempts clergy of all denominations from the requirement to report child abuse if they learn about the crime in a confessional setting.


Rep. Angela Romero speaks on the steps of the state Capitol, during a rally to gain support for removing the clergy exemption from mandatory reporting in cases of abuse and neglect, on Friday, Aug. 19, 2022, in Salt Lake City. 

(Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

Utah’s Catholic leaders had mobilized against HB90 arguing that it threatened the sacred privacy of confessions. More importantly, it met with disapproval from some members in the powerful Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known as the Mormon church, whose followers comprise the vast majority of the state Legislature. HB90 was dead on arrival.

In 33 states, clergy are exempt from any laws requiring professionals such as teachers, physicians and psychotherapists to report information about alleged child sexual abuse to police or child welfare officials if the church deems the information privileged.

This loophole has resulted in an unknown number of predators being allowed to continue abusing children for years despite having confessed the behavior to religious officials. In many of these cases, the privilege has been invoked to shield religious groups from civil and criminal liability after the abuse became known to civil authorities.

Over the past two decades state lawmakers like Romero have proposed more than 130 bills seeking to create or amend child sex abuse reporting laws, an Associated Press review found. All either targeted the loophole and failed to close it, or amended the mandatory reporting statute without touching the clergy privilege amid intense opposition from religious groups. The AP found that the Roman Catholic Church has used its well-funded lobbying infrastructure and deep influence among lawmakers in some states to protect the privilege, and that influential members of the Mormon church and Jehovah’s Witnesses have also worked in statehouses and courts to preserve it in areas where their membership is high.


FILE- MJ and her adoptive mother sit for an interview in Sierra Vista, Ariz., Oct. 27, 2021. State authorities placed MJ in foster care after learning that her father, the late Paul Adams, sexually assaulted her and posted video of the assaults on the Internet. 

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, File)

In Maryland a successful campaign to defeat a proposal that would have closed the clergy-penitent loophole was led by a Catholic cardinal who would later be defrocked for sexually abusing children and adult seminarians.

In other states, such as California, Missouri and New Mexico, vociferous public and backroom opposition to bills aimed at closing the loophole from the Catholic and Mormon churches successfully derailed legislative reform efforts.

“They believe they’re on a divine mission that justifies keeping the name and the reputation of their institution pristine,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, speaking of several religious groups. “So the leadership has a strong disincentive to involve the authorities, police or child protection people.”


FILE - Kristy Johnson speaks during a news conference June 28, 2018, in Salt lake City. Johnson, a California woman suing her father for sexual abuse that occurred during her childhood, says Mormon church leaders allowed the sexual assault to continue by failing to report it to police. Johnson said that her now-deceased mother told local church leaders about the abuse multiple times during the 1960-1970s. 

(AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

LOOPHOLE PROTECTS CHURCHES FROM SURVIVORS AND PROSECUTORS

Last month, an AP investigation found that a Mormon bishop in Arizona, at the direction of church leaders, failed to report a church member who had confessed that he sexually abused his 5-year-old daughter. The AP found that Rep. Merrill Nelson, a church lawyer and Utah Republican lawmaker, had advised the bishop not to report the abuse to civil authorities because of Arizona’s clergy privilege law, according to documents revealed in a lawsuit. That failure to report allowed the church member, the late Paul Adams, to repeatedly rape his two daughters and allegedly abuse one of his four sons for many years.

In response to the case, state Sen. Victoria Steele, a Democrat from Tucson, on three occasions proposed legislation to close the clergy reporting loophole in Arizona. Steele told the AP that key Mormon lawmakers including a former Republican state senator and judiciary committee chairmen thwarted her efforts before her proposals could be presented to the full Legislature.


 Demonstrators watch as former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick leaves Dedham District Court after his arraignment, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021, in Dedham, Mass. McCarrick has pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting a 16-year-old boy during a wedding reception in Massachusetts nearly 50 years ago. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)© 

“It’s difficult for me to tell this story without talking about the Mormons and their power in the Legislature,” Steele said. “What this boils down to is that the church is being given permission to protect the predators and the children be damned. … They are trying with all of their might to make sure this bill does not see the light of day.”


FILE - An illuminated sign outside St. Michael Archangel Catholic Church in Houston reads, "Go, and from now on do not sin any more" on April 11, 2019. 

(AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File0

Latter-day Saints and Catholics hold a number of influential positions as leaders and committee chairmen in the Arizona Legislature, including the speaker of the House, and have been known to advance or block legislation in line with the church’s priorities and values.

In one high-profile example, two Republican legislators took a stand in 2019, refusing to vote for a budget until lawmakers passed a measure allowing past victims of child sexual abuse to sue churches or youth groups that turned a blind eye to the abuse. Legislative business ground to a halt for weeks amid fierce opposition from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Roman Catholic Church and insurers along with their allies in the Legislature, which finally approved the measure.


The 33 highlighted states on this map show where clergy are exempt from laws requiring them to report information about alleged child abuse to officials. More than 130 bills have been introduced to amend child sex abuse reporting laws and none of them succeeded in closing the clergy loophole.© Provided by Associated Press

The Adams case is not the only example of the privilege being invoked in cases where a clergy member's failure to report led to prolonged abuse. In Montana, for example, a woman who was abused by a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the mid-2000s won a $35 million jury verdict against the church for failing to report her abuse. But in 2020 the state Supreme Court reversed the judgment, ruling that church leaders were under no obligation to report, citing the state’s clergy-penitent privilege.

The privilege can also be used to protect religious organizations from criminal liability. In 2013, a former Boise, Idaho, police officer turned himself in for abusing children, something he had reported to 15 members of the Mormon church, none of whom notified authorities. But prosecutors declined to file charges against the church because of Idaho’s clergy-penitent privilege law.

The Mormon church said in a written statement to the AP that a member who confesses child sex abuse “has come seeking an opportunity to reconcile with God and to seek forgiveness for their actions. ... That confession is considered sacred, and in most states, is regarded as a protected religious conversation owned by the confessor.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops did not immediately return a request for comment about its campaigns against state bills seeking to do away with the clergy-penitent privilege.

But supporters of the clergy privilege say abolishing it will not make children safer. Some go so far as to say that the ability of abusers to report privately to clergy encourages them to confess and often leads to stopping the abuse.

“It’s considered essential to the exercise of religion to have a priest-penitent privilege that will allow people to to approach their clergy for the purpose of unburdening themselves, their mind, their soul … to seek peace and consolation with God as well as with their fellow beings,” Utah state Rep. Nelson told the AP. “Without that assurance of secrecy, troubled people will not confide in their clergy.”

Jean Hill, the government liaison for Utah’s Catholic Diocese who helped organize opposition to Romero's bill, pointed to a single research paper to argue that laws that target privileged, confessional conversations in the context of child abuse have not increased reporting in those communities.

“When you take away every opportunity for people to get help, they go underground and the abuse continues,” Hill said.

But the authors of the study Hill cited, published in 2014, have cautioned about reaching such conclusions based on their research.

Frank Vandervort, a law professor at the University of Michigan, and his co-author, Vincent Palusci, a pediatrics professor at New York University, told the AP that the study was limited, partly because churches often wouldn’t give them access to data on clergy reporting.

“A single article should not be the basis for making policy decisions,” said Vandervort, lead author of the study. “It may be entirely the case that there’s no connection between the changing of the laws and the number of reports.”

PRIVILEGE NOT ‘CONSTITUTIONALLY REQUIRED’

Efforts to rid state laws of the privilege have been successful in only a handful of states, including North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and West Virginia. Records and interviews with lawmakers in the 33 states that still have the privilege show that intense opposition from powerful religious organizations is more often too much to overcome.

Former California state Sen. Jerry Hill said a bill he introduced in 2019 to require clergy members to report suspicion of child sex abuse or neglect by co-workers was killed after opposition from the Catholic and Mormon churches, as well as other religious groups.

“The opposition of the Catholic Church was instrumental in creating a lot of controversy around the bill and a lot of questions related to religious freedom,” Hill said. The Catholic Church made it clear it would sue if the bill passed, Hill said.

Michael Cassidy, a professor at Catholic-affiliated Boston College Law School and a former state prosecutor, said it’s not clear how a religious freedom case regarding the clergy privilege would turn out.

Some supporters believe the privilege is securely rooted in the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion. But Cassidy said “there is no firm precedent that says the clergy-penitent privilege is constitutionally required.”

“The Supreme Court has never held that,” Cassidy said.

He’s proposed a middle path: allow clergy to maintain the secrecy of the confessional but carve out an exception for “dangerous persons” including child sex abusers.

Often, legislative efforts to close the clergy loophole run up against lawmakers who are also church members, as well as intimidation from advocacy groups aligned with various religions. It’s a one-two punch that has killed many bills quietly before they are even introduced, and has led to the privilege loophole being deemed by child welfare advocates as a poison pill included in mandatory reporting bills, the AP’s review found.

In Utah, after religious officials publicly opposed her bill seeking to close the loophole, state Rep. Romero, a lifelong Catholic, received ominous voicemails and emails. Fearing for her staff’s safety, she reported some of them to state law enforcement.

“It’s utterly despicable that you think that this is all right,” said one anonymous caller claiming to represent a group called Young Americans for Liberty. “If you care to, return my message. If not, I’m going to call you every day until you do.”

The blowback also got personal: Devout Catholic members of Romero’s own family stopped talking to her. “They thought I was trying to attack the Catholic Church and get rid of confession, one of our sacraments,” Romero said. “That’s how it was presented to them.”

In 2003, as the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal swept the nation, a bill seeking to rid Maryland of the privilege in child abuse cases evoked a strong rebuke from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then the powerful archbishop of the Diocese of Washington, D.C.

“If this bill were to pass, I shall instruct all priests in the Archdiocese of Washington who serve in Maryland to ignore it,” McCarrick wrote in a Catholic Standard column. “On this issue, I will gladly plead civil disobedience and willingly — if not gladly — go to jail.”

The bill withered under McCarrick’s attack and never emerged from committee. Similar legislation proposed in 2004 suffered the same fate. Today, the clergy-penitent privilege in Maryland remains intact, even though McCarrick has been defrocked for sex crimes.

Virginia updated its mandatory reporting law in 2006. While the bill started out with clergy among those listed as reporters with the privilege intact, they would be removed from the final bill. The privilege, oddly, was left in. The state went on in 2019 to add ministers, priests, rabbis and other religious officials to the list of mandatory reporters of child abuse, but again protected the clergy-penitent privilege.

State Del. Karrie Delaney, a Virginia Democrat who sponsored the bill in 2019 that added clergy to the list of mandated reporters, said that including language to close the privilege would have doomed the bill.

“We wanted to pass the bill,” Delaney said. “And we knew that not having that (exemption) in there would have drawn an enormous amount of resistance from particular faith communities that really would have put the bill in jeopardy.”

In heavily Catholic Pennsylvania, 40 bills have included changes in mandatory child sex abuse reporting laws over the past two decades. None of them has challenged the clergy-penitent privilege. That comes as no surprise to child sex abuse survivors and their advocates, who have seen the Catholic Church and its lobbyists spend millions in a battle in Pennsylvania over a proposed two-year legal window for survivors to file lawsuits against their alleged abusers.

In other states, legislators said they didn't know clergy had a way around reporting abuse. After learning of the loophole from the AP, Vermont state Sen. Richard Sears, a Democrat, said he would introduce a bill in the next legislative session to try to close it. “I wasn’t even aware it existed,” Sears said.

In 2003, amid the uproar over the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, several states added clergy to their child sex abuse reporting laws, often with the exception for clergy who learn about child sex abuse during spiritual confessions.

That’s what happened in New Mexico.

With the privilege protected, the bill sailed easily through both houses and was even supported by The Archdiocese of Santa Fe, which was embroiled in its own church sexual abuse scandal.

Since then, there have been several bills introduced in the New Mexico Legislature aimed at clarifying language in the reporting law. Only one would have eliminated the clergy-penitent privilege. It died in committee.

“We have repeatedly asked the Legislature to strengthen reporting requirements in schools and religious institutions,” state Attorney General Hector Balderas told the AP. He said unreported child abuse is a major problem “resulting in tremendous amounts of trauma.”

___

Associated Press writers Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama; Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska; Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas; Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California; Jim Anderson in Denver, Colorado; Randall Chase in Dover, Delaware; Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida; Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta; Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho; John O'Connor in Springfield, Illinois; Dylan Lovan in Louisville, Kentucky; Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; David Sharp in Portland, Maine; Brian Witte in Annapolis, Maryland; Steve LeBlanc in Boston; Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan; Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis; Summer Ballentine in Jefferson City, Missouri; Amy Hanson in Helena, Montana; Gabe Stern in Carson City, Nevada; Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico; James MacPherson in Bismarck, North Dakota; Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio: Andrew Selsky in Salem, Oregon; Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Sam Metz in Salt Lake City; Wilson Ring in Montpelier, Vermont; Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia; Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington; and Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed to this report.

___

Follow Jason Dearen and Michael Rezendes on Twitter at @jhdearen and @MikeRezendes. Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Edmonton resumes first full homeless count since pandemic began

Lauren Boothby -  Edmonton Journal

Homeward Trust was set to resume the homeless count on Wednesday evening for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began.


Volunteers are resuming the in-person homeless count meant to take a snapshot of how many people are houseless at a point in time. 

Around 200 volunteers and community agencies were set to walk the city streets Wednesday evening and into Thursday to meet with self-identified houseless people, gathering data at a single point in time that will help social agencies plan how to assist struggling Edmontonians into the future.

The last regular count was in 2018. Homeward Trust opted to do an administrative count in 2020 instead — gathering data from the housing sector, shelters, Alberta Health Service and the justice ministry. Homelessness has surged since the onset of the pandemic with more people camping outdoors 

Homeward Trust has continued maintaining its “By-Name-List” which tracks people in the system by their name and birthday through these sectors — nearly 2,700 people are on it already.

Susan McGee, Homeward Trust CEO, told Postmedia ahead of the count that this helps track trends over time, and provides information needed to confidently prioritize which programs to fund.

“The visibility of homelessness is different today than it was before the pandemic, and we know that across Canada. Every city is being really challenged with both increases in real numbers (and) just the visibility through encampments,” she said.

“There are some very urgent needs in our community, that are very obvious, that are simply not resourced efficiently.”

McGee said the count is a snapshot of what is seen at a particular moment in time. It’s impossible to identify everyone, but the count and By-Name-List, are important for the agencies trying to help, she said.

Deaths from homelessness rose 70 per cent in one year — 222 people died in 2021, according to advocacy group Edmonton Coaliation on Housing and Homelessness (ECOHH).
More people affected by housing issues: ECOHH

Meantime, ECOHH was also hoping to raise awareness about homelessness and gather support to fund more affordable housing on Wednesday.

ECOHH president Nadine Chalifoux said the goal is to share the “shameful” data with Edmontonians and assert that in a wealthy country like Canada, no one should be without a home.

“There is no reason for this travesty. For decades governments invested in social housing, and homelessness was nearly non-existent. ECOHH wants people to send the premier and the prime minister a message that it is time for a significant investment in non-market housing to end this long-drawn out pain,” she said in a news release.

Homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg of a problem that begins when people find themselves in housing they can’t afford, ECOHH asserts.

Edmonton’s new housing needs assessment predicts nearly 60,000 households will be in core housing need within four years and there will be a shortage of about 40,000 affordable rental housing units. That assessment points to a significant shortfall of rental housing far below current market rates.

McGee also pointed out a lack of long-term funding for affordable housing from provincial and federal governments, who for many years only focused on filling short-term needs.

“Affordable housing is, really in our mind, part of our infrastructure. It’s part of our social fabric, it’s part of what allows families to be successful, to be hopeful, and to contribute as much as they can to being part of a healthy community. When we see it that way, we don’t launch funding programs for five years and then shut them down, we start to look at the needs differently,” she said.

“It’s part of what we regularly need to plan for, like we plan for schools and we plan for other services and community wellness.”

lboothby@postmedia.com
@laurby

Calgary conducts first count of homelessness in 4 years

Adam Toy - Yesterday 

On Tuesday night, a small army of people combed Calgary to collect a better picture of homelessness in the city.


Members of Calgary civil society organizations conduct a point-in-time count of the city's homeless population, pictured on Sept. 28, 2022.© Global News

“The point-in-time count -- or, as we like to call it, the ‘pit count’ -- provides a snapshot of homelessness on any given night," said Patricia Jones, president and CEO of the Calgary Homeless Foundation.

"It's just one of the tools we use to measure homelessness in Calgary and as a result of that, to kind of manage and design systems and supports for people experiencing homelessness.”

While Calgary has been doing counts every other year since 1992, the last one was done in 2018. The onset of the pandemic cancelled the 2020 count.

Read more:
Joint funding recommended to support Calgary’s future extreme weather response

On Tuesday evening, point-in-time counts were being done concurrently in Calgary, Edmonton, Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.

Read more:
Edmonton homeless population count set for Wednesday, history shows need for winter shelter space

The ersatz census collects three types of data: administration of housing and shelters; systems like social services, health and justice; and data collected from in-person surveys.

Related video: Former army medic visits homeless encampments to offer medical care, compassion and dignity

Duration 3:01  View on Watch

“It's not an intrusive process or is as less-intrusive as we can be. It's relational, it's respectful and it protects people's privacy,” Jones said.

“They will be asking very specific questions so we can gather data to get a specific point in time of the amount of people experiencing homelessness and what some of the primary issues are.”

Video: Powerful and personal stories of housing struggles shared with Edmonton council committee

The data collection also allows civil society organizations to work with people experiencing homelessness to better understand “what the current situation is in the community, any progress that's being made in our efforts to end homelessness, where there may be some gaps or challenges, where we need to potentially refocus some energy, that there are certain subpopulations within that group that might need additional support in order to exit homelessness,” Elaine Wilson at CUPS Calgary said.

Jones said having updated data, especially after the onset of the pandemic that hit many Albertans’ health and work, is vital for those who are living on the edge of homelessness.

“There's a lot of people still falling between the cracks.

"I believe we have a one per cent vacancy rate in Calgary. I think inflation is up by 20 per cent. So there are a lot of people kind of on the edge of the wedge and we need to make sure we have that safety net because I think that is the mark of a healthy community: the manner in which they support those most vulnerable,” Jones said.

Read more:
Number of people sleeping rough in Calgary increases

Wilson said CUPS’ services, like its basic needs funds, have been under increased demand since COVID-19.

“Those basic needs that individuals (who) maybe prior to COVID had a steady job or had some sort of income that they may have lost or had challenges due to COVID not being able to work, I think a lot of that contributed to seeing an increase of people reaching out for support,” she said.

“I do think one of the benefits to have come from COVID has been a real sense of collaboration among the sector.

“But we are still, even now as we kind of slowly start to come out the other side, are seeing those long-lasting impacts that COVID has had on a lot of individuals who may have not had a lot of other resources that they were able to access."

Light from a quasar shows hints of one of the universe’s first stars

Yesterday
By Leah Crane


An artist's impression of Population III stars, the very first stars in the universe NSF's NOIRLab© Provided by New Scientist

We may have found traces of the very first stars in the universe. These strange objects, called Population III stars, are expected to have exploded in massive supernovas that destroyed the stars entirely, and astronomers may have seen remnants from one of these extraordinary events.

Yuzuru Yoshii at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues found these hints while examining the light of a quasar, an extremely bright object at the centre of a galaxy powered by matter falling into a supermassive black hole. This particular quasar, called J1342+0928, is one of the most distant ever spotted at nearly 30 billion light years away. It formed less than 700 million years after the big bang.

The spectrum of the quasar’s light revealed a huge amount of iron, more than 20 times as much as the sun has. The quasar also seems to have a very low concentration of magnesium. These elements are important because they are produced in different processes, so their relative abundances can be used to determine what kind of cosmic object they came from. The abundances found in this quasar could not be explained by standard models.
How gravitational waves reveal the hidden universe Emma Osborne at New Scientist Live this October

The researchers found that the most reasonable way to produce so much iron so soon after the big bang was in a pair-instability supernova: a special kind of explosion that only occurs in extraordinarily massive stars, wherein they explode completely and leave no stellar core behind, unlike other kinds of supernova. If such a supernova exploded close to quasar J1342+0928, debris would then fall towards the galaxy's centre, eventually becoming incorporated into the quasar.

The amount of magnesium produced in such a supernova is determined largely by the mass of the star that exploded. “I was delighted and somewhat surprised to find that a pair-instability supernova of a star with a mass about 300 times that of the sun provides a ratio of magnesium to iron that agrees with the low value we derived for the quasar,” said Yoshii in a statement.

This is the clearest signature of a pair-instability supernova yet, he said. Because these supernovas can only occur in stars more than about 130 times as massive as the sun, this may also be evidence for the existence of Population III stars, which would have all been destroyed long ago.

These stars are crucial to our understanding of the universe, because they would have been the first to produce elements more massive than helium. They are also often considered to be potential seeds for supermassive black holes, which are so unimaginably huge that it’s hard to find a way to create them in the early universe without similarly colossal stars.

Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal, DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac8163

Is Earth Being Pummeled by Derelict Alien Spacecraft?

David Axe - Yesterday 

Between 1957 and 1968, scientists decided to try their hand at creating new minerals that could act as very effective conductors of electricity. They “invented” a pair: heideite and brezinaite.


Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

After a few years, the same minerals unexpectedly started showing up in fragments of meteorites that had landed on Earth. As it turns out, these weren’t materials that had to be invented—though how they were able to form outside the lab remained a mystery to scientists.

Now, six decades later, a Venezuelan researcher is trying to connect the dots between the minerals those scientists made in labs and the same minerals that came crashing to Earth from space.

Maybe, just maybe, those superconducting minerals that came from space are also artificial, B.P. Embaid, a physicist at Central University of Venezuela, hypothesized in a study—not yet peer-reviewed—that appeared online on Sept. 13.

And if that’s the case, the minerals could be evidence of extraterrestrial technology—“technosignatures,” as scientists like to say. “It is important to be open-minded and even provocative to consider the following question: are these meteoritic minerals samples of extraterrestrial technosignatures?” Embaid wrote.

It’s a controversial proposition. The implications are enormously attractive: Scientists who study alien technosignatures want to find alien tech and get confirmation we aren’t alone in the universe. But even they aren’t convinced by Embaid’s study. There are plenty of reasons to believe those exotic minerals aren’t evidence of extraterrestrial civilization.

“I’m very skeptical these minerals represent technosignatures,” Edward Schwieterman, an astrobiologist at University of California, Riverside, told The Daily Beast. It’s entirely possible heideite and brezinaite occur naturally somewhere out there in space. And in that case, we wouldn’t need E.T. to explain the minerals’ presence in a handful of space rocks.

But Embaid’s broader point—that evidence of aliens could exist right under our noses—has more merit. Scientists largely agree that we should be looking more widely, with more open minds, for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations. Embaid didn’t respond to requests for comment.

It was way back in 1957 when scientists first synthesized brezinaite by combining, and carefully layering, chromium and sulfur. Twelve years later, astronomers studying a meteorite that had plummeted to the ground near Tucson, Arizona in 1850 found brezinaite in the space rock’s structure. The same weird mineral later turned up in other meteorites that had already fallen on Earth.

Heideite is a more recent discovery. Scientists first created it in a lab in 1968 by combining chromium, iron, sulfur and titanium. Six years later, heideite turned up in a meteorite that had lodged itself in the ground in India in 1852. In 1995, scientists found heideite in a second meteorite—one that had landed in Yemen in 1980.

It’s not some cosmic coincidence that we discovered brezinaite and heideite in labs and then, a few years later, detected them in meteorites. The minerals have been spinning around space for eons, of course—and are probably embedded in countless meteorites peppering our planet. We just never noticed them before the late 1960s because we had no idea they even existed before we created them for ourselves, and didn’t notice them when they were right under our nose.

Scientists even have a name for our tendency to notice things all around us only after we’ve decided they’re important. “Frequency illusion.” The classic example in the scientific literature is people who see red cars everywhere after deciding to buy—you guessed it—a red car

Brezinaite and heideite are special—not the least because they’re very, very conductive. Possibly even superconductors. That is, electricity might pass through them without resistance. Superconductors are key components in a wide array of modern technology, like computer chips and medical instruments. It’s not for no reason human scientists created brezinaite and heideite.

So it would make sense for an alien civilization to create these minerals, too. Intelligent life, whether it’s on this planet or one halfway across the galaxy, is working with the same natural elements and the same laws of physics.

That doesn’t mean brezinaite and heideite only come from labs. Sure, they don’t occur naturally on Earth—we have to manufacture them. But they might occur naturally somewhere else in the galaxy, however.

In other words, brezinaite and heideite falling from the sky isn’t necessarily evidence of aliens.

But Embaid thinks brezinaite and heideite are so odd—with their unique formulations and layering—that there’s a good chance they’re always manufactured. A good chance, that is, that all the brezinaite and heideite in the galaxy come from labs—whether our labs or the labs of some alien civilization. “The genesis of these meteoritic minerals could require [a] controlled and sophisticated process not easily found in nature,” Embaid wrote.

Maybe. Ravi Kopparapu, an expert in technosignature research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast we need a lot more data before we start making bold claims about brezinaite and heideite. “Believability is robust only when additional experiments are conducted, and verified independently, that these are not natural.”

Scientists should scour space for evidence of some natural process that inputs chromium, iron, sulfur and titanium and outputs, say, heideite. They should be looking for proof that nature can’t make brezinaite or heideite on its own.

“If many attempts are made and this hypothesis is still unfalsified, then we may start asking ourselves about the possibility that these minerals were made by industrial processes—in other words, that they are technosignatures,” Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, told The Daily Beast.

If it’s the case that brezinaite and heideite are exclusively synthetic, the implication is clear. Any meteorite we find that contains brezinaite or heideite isn’t some natural space rock. It’s a fragment of alien technology—specifically, “derelict technology,” according to Embaid. Remains of long-defunct spacecraft or probes.

How this alien tech might’ve arrived on Earth isn’t hard to imagine. At least one probe or other craft traveled to the solar system potentially millions or billions of years ago, and at some point lost power and got caught in the gravity of the sun or one of the several planets already in orbit. That spacecraft could have broken apart and been scattered into many pieces across the system. Some of those pieces fell to Earth as meteorites.

If this sounds outlandish, consider that just five years, a very strange, shiny, oblong object the size of a cruiser liner barreled into the solar system then exited as quickly as it arrived. ‘Oumuamua, as the object became known, is unlike anything else we’ve ever observed. At least one prominent Harvard scientist believes it might be an alien craft.

If ‘Oumuamua is an intact alien craft, then all those meteorites containing brezinaite or heideite could be what’s left of a much less fortunate vehicle—one that fell to pieces during its long journey.

It’s an exciting story. Perhaps too exciting to be plausible. The more boring explanation might be the far more likely one—that brezinaite and heideite occur naturally somewhere in the vastness of space. And meteorites containing the minerals are just rocks, not the ancient remains of a wrecked alien spaceship.

Even if Embaid is wrong to champion brezinaite and heideite as possible technosignatures, his heart might be in the right place. As our understanding of the universe expands and our shared conviction that the human species is special gets a long-needed reality check, more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that aliens are probably out there, somewhere, in one form or another.

The math checks out. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. And there are potentially trillions of galaxies in addition to ours. Multiply the two and you get a total population of stars somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If other galaxies are like our own, most of those stars have at least one planet the size of Earth.

That’s a lot of planets. A lot of potentially wet and warm rocks, similar to ours, that could evolve life. Should other circumstances break well, eventually that life could become intelligent, and might invent technology.

Signs of that tech could come in many different forms: pollution from alien farms and factories, or giant inhabitable structures containing entire stars, or explosive bursts of radiation from the engines of high-tech spacecraft belonging to some other sentient species, just to name a few A team of scientists this summer began drawing up a new, more expansive list of potential technosignatures.

The list doesn’t include superconducting chunks of some derelict alien craft. But maybe it should.

Before Webb Took Mesmerizing Images of Our Universe, It Enhanced Human Vision

Eric Tegler - Tuesday

The James Webb Space Telescope was a jumping-off point for measuring people’s eyes more accurately for LASIK surgery.

A machine used to analyze eye curvature was modified to measure Webb’s mirrors, and those superior results ended up improving LASIK technology.

NASA technologies have found their way into many different arenas of life, like freeze-dried foods.

This is the story of how NASA’s telescope measurement technology found its way into LASIK eye surgery.© Yuichiro Chino - Getty ImagesDue to a nerve problem, Lee Feinberg is legally blind in his left eye. The irony that Feinberg has been the Optical Telescope Element Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for the past 20 years is not lost on him.

“I first got into optics with the sort of idea of finding something to fix my left eye,” he explains. While he’s yet to find a solution to his own vision issue, Feinberg’s work with NASA on the James Webb Space Telescope at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has helped improve the eyesight of millions who enjoy the clear-eyed benefits that LASIK surgery yields with technology spun-off from the program.

Successful technology spinoffs are a consistent feature of the work NASA has undertaken since its start in 1958. From the freeze-dried foods and kidney-dialysis machines developed for the Apollo space program in the 1960s, to a ruggedized infrared camera and a process for making stronger, less pollutive concrete commercially licensed this year, the agency’s programs have led to about 2,000 spinoffs in total.

In the early 2000s, NASA Goddard engineers were struggling with the problem of how to produce a large, multi-segment mirror for the JWST. The successor to the Hubble Telescope was envisioned as the largest optical telescope in space, with the sensitivity to view objects too early, distant, or faint for Hubble. By the time it was launched last December, JWST’s development had long since sown the seeds for better eyesight here on Earth.
A Measured Approach To a Golden Mirror


An animation illustrating the James Webb Space Telescope

.© NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The Webb Telescope has a big, gold mirror, 21 feet in diameter; the thin layer of gold helps JWST’s mirror reflect infrared light. It’s amazing to look at, but it was hell to make.

Space telescopes “see” by using mirrors to collect and focus light from distant stars. The bigger the mirror, the more details the telescope can see. Many of those details are hidden to human eyes, which can’t see through the dust in our universe.

By looking into space at a non-visible wavelength, JWST can see through the dust to stars and planets so far away that the expansion of the universe has made their light shift from visible to infrared.


The James Webb Space Telescope’s gold mirror.

© NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The large mirror is actually a combination of 18 hexagonal segments which had to be folded to fit inside the French Ariane 5 rocket which launched JWST. Each of the segments is exceptionally light—lighter than Hubble’s mirror by a factor of ten in aerial-density, Feinberg says. Producing them with the curvature and surface needed in the vastly cold space environment was not something NASA was sure it could do 20 years ago. After all, the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope slated to launch in 2003 had a mirror just 33 inches in diameter.

Related video: The James Webb Space Telescope Enters ‘Transformative Moment’ Captures Image of Alien World    Duration 1:16   View on Watch


The James Webb Space Telescope Provides ‘Breathtaking’ New Views of the Orion Nebula

Webb Telescope captures details of Phantom Galaxy and its 100 billion stars

KGUN Tucson, AZ

“We projected that making the mirrors at [the] rate of the previous Spitzer mirrors, it would take 75 years,” Feinberg recalls. “We had to figure out a way to make them a lot faster.”

NASA needed a way to finitely measure the mirrors as early as possible during production, ensuring that each segment was achieving the same resolution and intended curvature as it was built. “We had to polish them in such a way that, when they cool down, they become the mirror shape that we want,” Feinberg says. “We had to match the curvature of one mirror to the next, which was a very challenging problem.”

Feinberg and his colleagues thought they could do that using a device called a scanning Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, an optical instrument used for characterizing an imaging system. NASA asked an Albuquerque, New Mexico-based company called WaveFront Sciences to help.

WaveFront was already using a Shack-Hartmann sensor to measure the surface of the human eye to create 3D images for contact and interocular lenses, developing a system called the Complete Ophthalmic Analysis System (COAS). Using a superluminescent diode (similar to a laser) to measure the surface and contour of the eye, COAS would ultimately find an application in LASIK procedures and in a system called iDesign.

A Natural Crossover

Crafting new algorithms to adapt COAS to measure the surface of the JWST mirrors was something the company viewed as a natural crossover between astronomy and opthamology, Kristian Santana remembers. Today, Santana is the principal electrical engineer for Santa Ana, California-based Johnson & Johnson Vision, but back then, he was part of the WaveFront team. “We were eager to see what we could do to help NASA achieve its goal.”

NASA’s investment in WaveFront helped it speed up development of COAS while both learned about measuring Webb’s mirrors. There were meaningful similarities in the need for consistent surfaces and curvatures across 18 telescope mirrors or two eyes, though Feinberg admits he didn’t see it at the time.

“I didn’t really pick up on that potential. There were other technologies in Webb that I thought could be useful for this or that. In retrospect the [LASIK] application seems obvious,” he says.


The Johnson & Johnson Vision iDesign Refractive Studio. Patients look into the iDesign device for 20 seconds or so. It processes 3D eye measurements, which register on an integral display. A doctor inputs the measurement data into a laser for the LASIK surgical procedure.

© Johnson & Johnson Vision

Santana says working on the JWST problem helped WaveFront “really push the boundaries to measure people’s eyes in a more accurate, faster way with better equipment.”

WaveFront fleshed out iDesign and rolled out the system commercially in 2015. By then, Abbott Medical Optics had acquired it. In turn, Johnson & Johnson acquired iDesign in 2017, which incorporated it into its iDesign Refractive Studio, which won FDA approval in 2018.

If you are someone who’s had LASIK, you may recall looking into the iDesign device for 20 seconds or so. It processes 3D eye measurements, which register on an integral display. A doctor inputs the measurement data into a laser for the LASIK surgical procedure.

The iDesign Refractive Studio is widely used throughout the optical care industry, and its results are widely praised. So are the first images from JWST that were released in July, including a spectacular image of young stars forming in the Carina Nebula.

Other spinoffs from JWST range from optical interferometers to applications for laser measurement, cutting and drilling, and flat-screen televisions. Feinberg thought all along that there would be other applications for technologies developed for Webb, “but I was still really happy that this [LASIK] spinoff became a reality.”

THE PRICE HAS NEVER CHANGED
NO MATTER THE PROVIDER

Asteroid impacts on moon coincide with some on Earth, glass bead study shows

Nina Massey -


Asteroid impacts on the moon millions of years ago coincided with some of the largest meteorite impacts on Earth, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, research suggests.


Asteroid impacts on the moon coincided with major impacts on Earth, research has suggested (Victoria Jones/PA)© PA Archive

The study also found that major impact events on Earth did not happen in isolation, but were accompanied by a series of smaller impacts.

Researchers suggest the findings shed new light on the asteroids in the inner solar system, including the likelihood of potentially devastating Earth-bound asteroids.

The team studied microscopic glass beads aged up to two billion years old that were found in regolith brought back to Earth from the moon in December 2020 as part of the Chinese National Space Agency’s Chang’e-5 Lunar mission.

We found that some of the age groups of the lunar glass beads coincide precisely with the ages of some of the largest terrestrial impact crater events, including the Chicxulub impact crater responsible for the dinosaur extinction event
Professor Alexander Nemchin, Curtin University

The heat and pressure of meteorite impacts created the glass beads and scientists say their age distribution should mimic the impacts, revealing a timeline of bombardments

Lead author Professor Alexander Nemchin, from Curtin University, Australia, said the findings imply the timing and frequency of asteroid impacts on the moon may have been mirrored on Earth, telling us more about the history of evolution of our own planet.

He added: “We combined a wide range of microscopic analytical techniques, numerical modelling, and geological surveys to determine how these microscopic glass beads from the moon were formed and when.

“We found that some of the age groups of the lunar glass beads coincide precisely with the ages of some of the largest terrestrial impact crater events, including the Chicxulub impact crater responsible for the dinosaur extinction event.

“The study also found that large impact events on Earth such as the Chicxulub crater 66 million years ago could have been accompanied by a number of smaller impacts.

“If this is correct, it suggests that the age-frequency distributions of impacts on the moon might provide valuable information about the impacts on the Earth or inner solar system.”

Co-author, Associate Professor Katarina Miljkovic, from Curtin’s Space Science and Technology Centre in Australia, said future studies could help shed light on the history of the moon.

“The next step would be to compare the data gleaned from these Chang’e-5 samples with other lunar soils and crater ages to be able to uncover other significant moon-wide impact events which might in turn reveal new evidence about what impacts may have affected life on Earth,” she added.

The findings are published in the Science Advances journal.

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The Glass Bead Game - The New York Times 

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Nov 9, 2015 ... The Glass Bead Game is set in a distant, possibly post-apocalyptic future and tells the life story of Joseph Knecht, who at the beginning is ...