Cheetah cub 'adopted' by mother at Cincinnati Zoo, increasing his chances at survival

Bebe Hodges, USA TODAY NETWORK

Updated Sat, June 22, 2024

Prepare to say, "Awww."

A cheetah from the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden just adopted a cub from Oregon.

The male cheetah cub joined his new family, which includes two other cubs and his mom, this week at a Cincinnati Zoo off-site breeding facility.

The cub, who has not yet been named, was introduced to the Cincinnati litter to increase his chance of survival. The cub was an only child when he was born. This posed an issue because singleton cubs don't provide enough stimulation for cheetah mothers to produce lactation.

Lucky for the cub, Cincinnati Zoo cheetah Etosha gave birth to two cubs earlier this month. Zoo keepers hoped Etosha would take care of him along with her two biological cubs if they introduced the cub.

The cub arrived in Cincinnati on Monday night and was placed in an incubator overnight to stabilize. On Tuesday, he was placed in the nest box with the other cubs.

A cub from Oregon was adopted by a cheetah at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden's off-site breeding facility.

Since then, Etosha has shown "great maternal behaviors," according to the zoo.

“Nursing has been observed, and she’s being attentive to all three cubs,” Tom Tenhundfeld, the zoo's Cheetah Breeding Center headkeeper, said in a release.

“It’s a good thing that cheetahs can’t count!" he said.

The zoo said it would announce the cub's name on social media. The zoo gave Lighthawk Conservation Flying the opportunity to name the cub to thank the nonprofit for transporting him from Oregon.

This is not the first time a cheetah at the zoo's Cheetah Breeding Center has adopted a cub.


The Cincinnati Zoo said it would announce the adopted cub's name on social media.

“We coordinate with the other cheetah breeding centers, so litters are born semi-close together so that if cross-fostering situations arise, the cubs are as close to the same age as possible,” Tenhundfeld said.

In 2016, Cincinnati Zoo cheetah Kathleen adopted the most genetically valuable cheetah cub in the North American zoo population.

The cubs are not visible to the public, but visitors can see cheetahs at the Cincinnati Zoo during regular hours.

Contributing: Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati Zoo cheetah adopts cub from Oregon upping survival chances

NATURE IN REVOLT

Elephant attacks are becoming more common, experts say

Andrea Sachs, (c) 2024 , The Washington Post
Fri, June 21, 2024 


Elephant attacks are becoming more common, experts say


An African elephant killed a 64-year-old tourist in Zambia on Wednesday, the second fatal attack in the country this year.

A parked tourist vehicle was observing a herd by the Maramba Cultural Bridge in the city of Livingstone when one of the elephants ambushed the car. According to the Associated Press, Juliana Gle Tourneau, a visitor from New Mexico, was thrown out and trampled to death.

On March 30, a bull elephant charged and flipped a game-drive vehicle in Zambia’s Kafue National Park. The male animal injured five passengers and killed Gail Mattson, a 79-year-old from Minnesota.

Wildlife experts say elephants have been exhibiting more aggressive behavior toward people because of growing pressure on their habitats and herds. According to the World Wildlife Fund, elephants have killed more than 200 people in Kenya over the last seven years. In India, several hundred people perish each year because of ill-fated elephant encounters, said Joshua Plotnik, an elephant behavior and cognition researcher at Hunter College in New York City.

“As human development expands and natural elephant habitat decreases, the frequency of interactions has inevitably increased,” Plotnik said. “This leads to more elephant and human deaths, unfortunately.”

Chase LaDue, a conservation scientist at the Oklahoma City Zoo, said the position and timing of safari vehicles can contribute to an attack. And “just like people,” he said, “elephants can get frustrated and act out after they’ve just gone through a stressful experience.”

“When you drive upon an elephant herd, you don’t know what happened 30 minutes ago,” LaDue said. “They may have just gotten out of a stressful situation and thought they were in the clear, and you caught them at the wrong moment.”

In the March incident, LaDue noted “the vehicle was in a bad spot with vegetation that made it difficult to give the elephant the space that it needed.”

Not all interactions end tragically. In March, a male elephant used its trunk like a crane to repeatedly lift and drop a wildlife-viewing truck in South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park. The guide scared off the elephant with loud noises, such as shouting, revving the engine and slamming the doors. No one was injured.

Wildlife experts say African elephants, which are the world’s largest land mammal, need a prodigious amount of space and resources to survive. However, human development has been nibbling away at their habitat. Tourists on safari are also encroaching on their diminishing space. In these situations, a human-elephant conflict, or HEC, can transpire.

“Instances of these HECs are increasing as elephants seek out high-quality food resources by crossing from national park or protected habitats and enter crop fields and farm lands,” Plotnik said.

Elephants are also more prone to aggression during certain phases of their life cycle. For example, males can turn dangerous when they are broadcasting their availability to potential mates.

During musth, their testosterone is surging, and they will secrete a chemical that leaves wet streaks on the side of their face. LaDue said uninformed visitors might misinterpret the drippings as tears or crying, but experienced safari guides should know better.

“Certainly any guide would recognize those [signs] and give male elephants wide berth,” he said.

Females, which can give birth any time of year, are very protective of their young. LaDue said the youngsters can be playful and mischievous, and may wander off. If a safari vehicle or caravan wedges itself between the baby and the mom or herd, a perilous situation could arise.

“Females have a vested interest in protecting those calves at all costs possible,” he said. “You can unknowingly get yourself in the danger zone where you’re splitting a calf from the rest of the herd. Or maybe you didn’t realize the mother was on one side and the calf is on the other. These sort of conflicts are relatively common in Africa.”

LaDue acknowledges that wildlife activities involve risk. To ensure a safer experience, he recommends travelers ask the safari company about what kind of training their guides undergo. At the very least, they should be experienced in first aid and medical emergency care. Some countries also have accreditation programs, he added.

If you come upon an elephant in a community or city, Plotkin said to avoid it. National parks, game reserves and protected areas, where elephants roam free, will limit the number of daily visitors or vehicles to reduce the stress on the colossal animals.

“As natural habitats with high-quality food continue to disappear, we are going to not only see more and more HEC, but the need to come up with more effective solutions will become even more important,” Plotkin said. “Human-elephant coexistence is the goal and requires coordinated efforts by governments, tourism agencies, local communities and conservationists to help humans and elephants.”

Elephant kills American tourist in Zambia

Ana Faguy - BBC News, Washington
Fri, June 21, 2024 


Authorities have warned tourists to exercise extreme caution while observing wildlife around the country [Reuters]


A US tourist from New Mexico was killed by an elephant, after it attacked her vehicle while parked during a safari drive in Zambia on Wednesday.

The animal pulled Juliana Gle Tourneau, 64, out of the vehicle and trampled her, officials said.

Ms Tourneau was with a group that had stopped near the Maramba Cultural Bridge in Livingstone due to traffic from an elephant herd when one of the animals attacked, a police official told the Zambian national broadcaster ZNBC.

This marks the second fatal elephant attack on a US tourist in the southern African country this year.

Gail Mattson, a 79-year-old woman from Minnesota, was killed during a game drive in Zambia's Kafue National Park.

During the March incident, an elephant charged the truck, flipped it over, killed Ms Mattson and injured five others.

Rona Wells, Ms Mattson's daughter, wrote on Facebook that her mother died in a "tragic accident while on her dream adventure".

Video of the attack later went viral and showed an elephant charging towards the vehicle. None of the vehicle passengers are seen in the video, but someone can be heard saying "oh my goodness," and "it's coming fast".

The vehicle stops to presumably attempt to stave off the elephant, but the animal hooks its tusk onto the vehicle and it rolls several times.

Zambian authorities have called on tourists to exercise extreme caution while observing wildlife around the country.

Zambia's neighbours Zimbabwe and Botswana have also raised concern about increasing elephant populations in their respective countries.

Zimbabwe has recorded deadly elephant attacks in recent years.

Project Liberty bid for TikTok assets part of plan to build 'a better internet'

Ivonne Flores Kauffman, BNN Bloomberg  

Jun 20, 2024

The move by U.S. lawmakers to force TikTok’s China-based parent company Bytedance to divest the company or face a ban in the U.S. has brought out numerous bidders for the asset, including one who is putting up money for a bid that would ultimately see the company belong to its user base.

Billionaire Frank McCourt, the founder of Project Liberty and former owner of numerous professional sports franchises, is backing the bid for TikTok's U.S. assets. In an interview with BNN Bloomberg McCourt said he would like the app to remain active in the U.S. but “not in the same form that it is now by scrapping everyone’s data and exploiting it.”

Instead, he sees a future version of the app built around a new system where users own and control their data on it.

"I am bidding in behalf of Project Liberty, it’s a people’s bid because we want society to be broadly involved in this exercise not only to be replacing Chinese capital with some other sovereign’s capital." Long term, he would prefer the company’s U.S user base of 150 million people “be part of the ownership group.”

That view is in keeping with his stated desire to change the current structure of the internet, which he says has been "colonized" by a handful of big tech companies.

"We have a big infrastructure problem," said McCourt. “We have a broken internet.”

McCourt said his biggest concern is not big tech companies like Google owning the infrastructure of the internet, but rather that they also own and control the data that goes on it.

McCourt has a long-stated desire to build a better internet and he used to believe better policies were the answer but has since come to realize that policy-making alone isn’t enough.

"Policy-making moves at a very deliberate pace, technology moves very, very fast, regulation cannot keep up with it."

It’s a big reason why in 2019, he greenlit Project Liberty, which focuses on developing the next generation of digital infrastructure. McCourt has committed US$500M to this project.

"Project Liberty is about fixing the tech, engaging civil society and creating policies for the future."

The telecom model

McCourt says changes in the U.S. telecom sector that took the market from an oligopoly to a competitive marketplace can be a model of how a better internet could look.

“Imagine an internet in which our personal information is portable, we take it with us where we want to go and we set the terms and conditions of use,” said McCourt, adding that if companies get an economic benefit from having access to our data, we should receive a part of that money.

"The new apps in this new world should be interoperable, so you have a million Davids instead of five Goliaths.”

McCourt added we are at an inflection point, “if we don’t fix what is broken, Generative AI will come and make it worse.”

“In what world do you take something that is broken and make it more powerful?” he said.

'I live in hell': Anti-growth fervour grips U.S. South after pandemic boom

Michael Sasso and Shelly Hagan, Bloomberg News   Jun 18, 2024

In Sumner County, Tennessee, the number of apartments in the county seat of Gallatin almost doubled from 2018 to 2022. Photographer: Seth Herald/Bloomberg

In Gallatin, Tennessee, house prices have jumped by two-thirds since the pandemic, and one local commissioner incensed at nearby homebuilding said she “lives in hell.” So many Californians have moved to the booming state that locals fear their lefty politics migrated with them, and lawn signs target the “greedy developers” they say are swallowing up farmland. 

Tennessee and several of its neighbors in the U.S. South are facing an anti-growth backlash, after turbocharged migration helped boost the region’s population by 2.7 million people — the size of Chicago. As traffic snarls in once-sleepy downtowns, apartment complexes replace meadows and municipal water systems strain under new demand, passions are running high in a way that goes beyond regular nimbyism.

In Sumner County, where the Cumberland River snakes through the verdant hills northeast of Nashville, the economy grew by 8.5 per cent a year from 2020 to 2022, putting it in the top seven per cent of all U.S. counties for growth. The number of apartments in the county seat of Gallatin almost doubled in the four years through 2022, according to property marketplace RentCafe.  

The boom — driven by transplants from blue states like New York and California — has spurred a right-wing group that marries conservative religious beliefs with restrictive policies on growth into control of the local legislative body. At a planning board meeting in May, the pressing agenda item was whether to boost minimum lot sizes in rural areas to at least 2.3 acres; big enough to ward off housing developers who need more density. 

“If you don’t, you’re going to be one big fat Nashville,” Mary Genung, a Sumner County commissioner backed by the group — the Sumner County Constitutional Republicans — told the planning board. Genung and her neighbors have for two years battled a project by homebuilding giant DR Horton Inc., which plans 675 homes on vacant land in Gallatin, population 50,000. 

“Where I live, I live in hell,” Genung said. The planning board supported the lot-size measure, bumping it up to the County Commission for a vote. DR Horton didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While not-in-my-backyard activists have long fought new developments, local officials and business groups across the South say they’ve seen a heightened level of anger since the pandemic-era growth. Arcane rules that govern issues like zoning exceptions, city annexation and impact fees, which apply levies to new construction projects intended to cover any extra infrastructure costs, are pitting cities against counties and counties against states. 

In some cases, the backlash stems from people mourning the loss of a small-town way of life. In others, public infrastructure simply can’t keep up. In Texas, city water and wastewater systems are over-stressed, while farm bureaus in Tennessee and South Carolina warn their agricultural land is being plowed over for subdivisions. 

Sumner County lost 16,000 acres of farmland from 2011 to 2022, according to the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, about triple the loss of the county average in Tennessee.  

“We had a big migration of people from the Midwest and Northeast to the South, and home prices skyrocketed,” said Lesley Deutch, managing principal at real estate consultancy John Burns Research & Consulting. “Now you’re getting pushback from the people that have lived on an acre lot.”

From early 2020 to mid-2023, the Southeast, including Texas, accounted for more than two-thirds of all U.S. job growth; almost double its pre-pandemic share. Tennessee’s economy was the second-fastest growing in the U.S. from 2020 to 2023, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; it tied with Nevada and trailed only Florida. 

So many Californians alone relocated to Tennessee — more than 22,000 in 2022, by one count, lured by lower property prices and a lack of income tax — that locals say they see T-shirts and bumper stickers around town reading, “Don’t California My Tennessee.” It’s a dig at Californians’ “lefty politics,” said Jimmy Kisner, whose family has operated a hardware store in Gallatin for 47 years. “Don't mess up what we’ve got, and don’t make our taxes go up.”

Tennessee is comfortably Republican despite the migration, with the GOP in the governor’s mansion, two U.S. Senate seats and eight of nine House seats.

Building spree

Once the home of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash — and, for a spell in high school, Taylor Swift — Sumner County had already been filling up fast in the decade through 2020, adding about 35,000 people, or around 18 per cent of its 200,000-strong population. Then, a huge run-up in single-family home prices during the pandemic priced many of the county’s workers out of the market. 

The median price of a single-family home in Gallatin is now US$472,000, data from Redfin Corp. show, and employers haven’t been able to pay enough to lure workers from Nashville, said Kathleen Hawkins, head of the Hendersonville Chamber of Commerce. With companies desperate for a local workforce, developers built more than 1,300 apartment units, primarily in Gallatin, from 2020 to 2022 alone, RentCafe data show.

Angry at what they saw as over-the-top development — plus a couple recent tax increases — the Sumner County Constitutional Republicans recruited and backed a slate of 14 candidates for the 24-member County Commission. They won in 2022, in an August election where just 15 per cent of voters turned out.

Since then, along with pushing for larger lot sizes, the group has railed against city council members in Gallatin, faulting them for allowing high-density housing developments on county land. It tried unsuccessfully this year to get state legislators to support a bill barring the city from annexing land without the county’s permission.

David Klein, a prominent member of the group known for his distinctive, handlebar mustache, said he’s not anti-growth, he just wants development to pay for itself. 

“In Gallatin, they are annexing like there’s no tomorrow,” Klein said, during a spin through town in his navy blue Ford F-150. “Lots and lots of apartments, and we have to fund the schools.” 

Some business leaders in neighboring cities and communities are spooked.

“I’m slightly concerned about that group,” Gallatin’s city planner, Brian Rose, said. Gallatin needs to keep growing to attract industry, boost the tax base and pay for things like parks, Rose said. 

Randall Carter, Tennessee regional president at First National Bank, does business with many farmers in the Gallatin area and showed up at the planning commission meeting in May to oppose the bigger lot sizes. He finds it ironic that a group of staunch conservatives, who traditionally eschew regulation, are creating rules on what people can do with their land.

“You can go so far to the right that you wind up being on the left,” Carter said.

Georgia, North Carolina

More than 250 miles away in Forsyth County, Georgia, a flourishing commuter area to Atlanta’s north, a recent post on the Nextdoor social-media site showed a campaign flyer attacking the approval of 2,600 apartments. The thread drew more than 300 comments.

“Apartments are the big issue, politically,” said Cindy Jones Mills, a Forsyth County commissioner not running for re-election. Her colleague, Laura Semanson, calls herself “big corporate developers’ worst nightmare,” on her campaign website, while commissioner Alfred John boasts that there have been “zero apartments approved” in his district on his watch.

Forsyth County’s sewage-treatment capacity has struggled for years to keep up with all the people moving in, said Patrick Foster, director of watchdog group Smart Growth Forsyth County, and developers haven’t always been held accountable. 

In coastal Brunswick County, North Carolina, where the population has grown by 20,000 in just four years, county commissioners pitched a succession of requirements all at once. One required a traffic study of new projects that could delay developments by up to nine months. 

The Wilmington Chamber of Commerce and the builder-backed Business Alliance for a Sound Economy sent Brunswick County leaders a letter, warning them that they risk boosting housing prices further and scaring off employers. But it’s needed because most of Brunswick’s roads are two lanes and at or near capacity, said Jim Bradshaw, a former economic development leader in Brunswick County who’s now pushing to slow down the growth of housing development.

In the fast-growing suburbs of Texas’s major cities, some communities are putting a halt on new construction because of water constraints. Magnolia, a town of about 5,000 people northwest of Houston, put a moratorium on new residential and commercial development in late 2022. The city has extended the policy because there aren’t enough wells to keep up with development. 

“We were building too many houses too fast,” said Don Doering, city administrator for Magnolia. Doering said the city is planning to build two wells a year for the foreseeable future, at a cost of $3 million each.

About an hour south of Sumner County, in the booming Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro, Rutherford County Mayor Joe Carr is battling with the Tennessee General Assembly to levy impact fees — which can run to thousands of dollars — on new developments. The local school system is struggling to keep up with the 1,200 new students moving in every year, and traffic is so bad that locals have learned not to turn left, Carr said, only half joking.

For now, bills in the General Assembly to let Rutherford County levy the fees have stalled. Carr chalks it up to the influence of real estate developers.

“I’m not looking for a fight, but I won’t shy away from one either,” Carr said.

 

TSMC nears US$1 trillion valuation as target upgrades boost rally

John Cheng, Bloomberg News

The bullish chorus on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is growing even louder as a stock rally puts its market capitalization closer to the US$1 trillion milestone.

A flurry of Wall Street brokerages have lifted their price targets for TSMC this week, citing surging AI-related demand and potential price hikes in 2025 to drive up earnings. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is the most bullish of all, increasing its price target by 19 per cent to NT$1,160 as it sees three- and five-nanometer chip manufacturing prices advancing by a “low single digit percentage.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co. says TSMC may “lift its 2024 revenue guidance and potentially move up its capex to the higher end of the guidance range,” and expects AI to contribute 35 per cent of total sales by 2028. Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley also raised their price targets on a stronger earnings outlook.

The foundry sector leader has emerged as a major beneficiary of the widening adoption of artificial intelligence, with its cutting-edge technology and valuation making it a favourite play among global investors. TSMC has also prospered from being the main advanced-chip supplier of Nvidia Corp. — recently crowned the world’s most-valuable company.

TSMC overtook Berkshire Hathaway Inc. last week to become the eighth-largest company globally in terms of market capitalization, based on the firm’s U.S.-listed ADRs. The depositary receipts’ 73 per cent gain this year has boosted the firm’s market value to $932 billion, shy of the $1 trillion threshold. 

“We now see even more attractive risk-reward for TSMC amid the growing, positive sentiment around AI,” Goldman analysts including Bruce Lu wrote in a note on Tuesday. “With the ongoing proliferation of AI, we see TSMC among the key beneficiaries.”

Trudeau's future is tied to the vote of a rich Toronto neighbourhood

Jacob Lorinc, Bloomberg News  Jun 21, 2024

The streets of Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood are lined with arching maple trees and multimillion-dollar homes, a plummy refuge for some of Canada’s wealthiest families and top business leaders. Now it’s also a red-hot political battleground in the fight to control the country’s highest office. 

On Monday, residents of this part of Toronto will vote in a closely watched special election for a vacant seat in the House of Commons. For Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has held power since 2015 by consistently winning big in Canada’s largest city, the stakes are high. A loss would dramatically raise the pressure on the embattled leader to quit ahead of a national election expected next year. 

Trudeau is facing a crisis of confidence in his ninth year in office. Polling shows he’s fallen out of favour while his main opposition, the Conservative Party, is surging. That puts unexpected seats in play, including this one, known as Toronto-St. Paul’s. Voters here have chosen the Liberal Party in every election since 1993, but pollsters say the Tories are within striking distance this time.

It’s a battle, in miniature, over the fault lines and forces that have stirred unrest across the country. Canada’s economy is growing at a sluggish pace. Housing is unaffordable to many, and elevated interest rates are still frustrating borrowers and aspiring homebuyers. 

The Israel-Hamas war looms especially large in Toronto-St. Paul’s, where Jewish residents comprise about 11 per cent of the population. Like U.S. President Joe Biden’s Democrats, Trudeau’s big-tent Liberals are trying to preserve support from both Jewish and Muslim communities while navigating a strained relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. 

The delicate approach has made Trudeau vulnerable to attacks from every direction. In the months since Oct. 7, the Conservatives have accused the Liberals of being too soft in supporting Israel and failing to combat antisemitism at home. This week, after Canada listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said the government was only making the announcement now to boost its chances in Toronto-St. Paul’s. 

Don Stewart, the Conservative candidate, has distributed fliers with messages condemning Hamas and supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. 

In a debate this week, Liberal hopeful Leslie Church — who was Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s chief of staff — promised to crack down on hate-motivated crimes targeting Jewish residents in part by calling for an increased police presence in the city. 

“We stand for fighting the wave of antisemitism we’ve seen in our communities,” she said.

A victory in Toronto would be a coup for the Conservatives, which hold no seats within the city of Toronto itself, though they do have representation in the suburbs. It may cement Poilievre’s status as the front-runner, and signal that he has a broad path to victory next year.

Jeff and Betty Kane, Forest Hill residents who voted for Trudeau when he first entered office, said they intend to vote for the Conservatives in the byelection, even though they’re skeptical of Poilievre’s leadership.

“We’re not for Poilievre so much as we’re against the Liberals,” said Jeff Kane, 78, a retired engineer. “I’m not actually sure I’d support him, were it not for how badly we’re doing as a country with Trudeau. We’re not growing economically as we should be.”

Trudeau’s approach to the Middle East is a “total mess,” he added. “For a while he was flip-flopping on Israel — for them, against them, and for them again. Now, after about eight months since the Hamas attack, he’s totally against Israel.”

Until now, despite his dreadful polling numbers, Trudeau has avoided calls for his resignation from within his party’s caucus. But if it loses a Liberal stronghold in left-leaning Toronto, there’s a risk that private grumblings will break into the open and imperil the leader’s grip on power.

At the same time, some Liberal insiders, speaking on condition they not be identified, doubted a loss would be enough to push Trudeau out. Byelections typically have weak voter turnout and can be influenced by events that have no bearing on a general election result, they argued.

The area’s reputation as a Liberal bastion is partly owed to its former representative, Carolyn Bennett, a party stalwart who stepped aside to become Canada’s ambassador to Denmark. Her support ran deep in middle-class neighborhoods like Wychwood and Humewood, while affluent Forest Hill tended to lean right.  

The results come down to “whoever’s most motivated to vote,” said Dan Arnold, chief strategy officer at Pollara and a former Liberal pollster. The Conservatives are on the rise across Canada, but the Liberals are better at campaigning in progressive Toronto districts, he said. 

“If the Liberals lose this riding, it’ll definitely get people talking,” said Arnold. 

 

College clampdown on track to halve student arrivals to Canada

Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg News   Jun 19, 2024

Students wait for the bus at Sheridan College in Brampton, Ontario. , Photographer: Laura Proctor/Bloomberg

Canada’s overhaul of its foreign student program is on track to halve the number of approved international study permits this year, according to an analysis by an education recruitment company.

If application numbers and approval rates seen in the first four months of this year remain constant throughout 2024, the number of approved study permits could drop to 229,000, ApplyBoard said in a report Wednesday, citing data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

That’s a 48 per cent drop from 436,678 permits approved last year. 

It’s an early sign that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cap on international student visas will drastically curb the explosive growth of temporary immigration, which had been a key driving force behind post-pandemic rapid population increases as well as worsening housing shortages.

Trudeau’s administration announced in late January that it aims to cut this year’s number of study permits by 35 per cent from 2023, with new restrictions targeted at a subsector within the higher education industry that’s essentially been selling courses as an immigration pathway to students — many of whom were from India.

Study permit applications from Indian students plunged to 4,210 in March, when provinces were finalizing their allocations of new visas for institutions. That’s compared with an average of 22,500 in the first two months of the year, the data showed. The sharp decrease “could be the first indication of seismic shifts in incoming student demographics,” ApplyBoard said. 

In the first quarter, students from Bangladesh, Ghana, Guinea and Senegal saw higher approval volumes compared to the same period a year earlier.

ApplyBoard expects some rebound in application numbers as governments, recruiters and students adapt to the new policies. But it still forecasts the final 2024 approved permit at 292,000, in line with the government’s 35 per cent reduction goal.

Brookfield-led group buys into Dubai school operator GEMS

Nicolas Parasie, Bloomberg News Jun 17, 2024

A consortium led by Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. is investing in GEMS Education, a Dubai-based family business founded by Indian immigrants who turned a single school into one of the world’s largest private education providers. 

Financial details weren’t disclosed, but Bloomberg News has previously reported that the Canadian firm was looking to invest about US$2 billion. That would make the transaction one of the largest private equity deals in a closely held business in the Gulf.

The company’s existing minority shareholders, including the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd., will exit as part of this transaction. The move will also allow CVC Capital Partners to exit a majority of its GEMS stake, five years after it bought into the firm in a deal that marked its first private equity foray in the Gulf. 

CVC remains “fully committed to investing further in this attractive region,” Ozgur Onder, head of the company’s Middle East operations, said in a statement. 

Besides Brookfield, other investors include Dubai-based Gulf Islamic Investments, Marathon Asset Management and the State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan, according to a statement. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter, subject to conditions. 

For Brookfield, the transaction marks the latest investment in a region where it has increasingly become active. It recently bought a stake in GII’s logistics unit and sold part of Dubai’s largest office tower to investors from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.

Separately, GEMS secured funds from a group of Emirati banks to finance the transaction, including for the repayment of the firms’ existing arrangements. 

Two-year saga

The group’s roots date back to 1959 when founder Sunny Varkey’s parents moved to Dubai from Kerala in southern India. Today, more than 135,000 students are enrolled at over 40 GEMS schools in the United Arab Emirates.

Its expansion over the years has mirrored Dubai’s own growth into a major financial hub. Parents in the city, which has a large expat population that boomed in the aftermath of the pandemic, spend large amounts on private education — sometimes upwards of $20,000 a year. 

The transaction brings to an end a sale process that began in 2022. Before that, Varkey tried to sell part of his stake in 2020, but failed to draw buyers as the pandemic spread. The firm also pursued a London initial public offering but those plans didn’t materialize. 

“The investment in GEMS marks a milestone for Brookfield and our private equity business in the Middle East, underscoring our commitment to investing in this high-growth region and the strength of our local partnerships,” said Jad Ellawn, Managing Partner and Regional Head of Brookfield in the Middle East.

Brookfield invested through its special investments and Middle East private equity programs. 

GEMS Education was advised by deNovo Partners — a Dubai-based boutique founded by former Morgan Stanley banker May Nasrallah — and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Ocado falls after Sobeys puts brakes on Vancouver automated warehouse

Jennifer Creery, Bloomberg News   Jun 20, 2024

Grocery delivery trucks at a fulfillment centre, operated by Ocado Group Plc, in Enfield, U.K., on Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020. Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

Ocado Group Plc shares tumbled after its Canadian partner temporarily halted the planned launch of an automated warehouse in Vancouver run by the British online grocery company.

Empire Company Ltd.’s subsidiary Sobeys and Ocado are also ending their exclusivity agreement in a setback for the British firm, according to a statement Thursday. The fourth Sobeys warehouse operated by Ocado was supposed to be operational next year.

Ocado shares fell as much as 16 per cent after the announcement, meaning they are now down 60 per cent this year.

Ocado was founded by three former Goldman Sachs bankers and sees its future as a maker of automated warehouses for supermarkets around the world. In the U.K., it’s best known for Ocado Retail, its online grocery venture with Marks & Spencer Group Plc.

The company is under pressure to demonstrate the success of its automated warehousing technology after a series of annual losses. 

Chief Executive Officer Tim Steiner has said he wants Ocado to become the “Tesla of Grocery” and that the company’s robot-operated warehouses are worth the investment. 

However, last year Steiner admitted that Ocado’s customers were not rolling out warehouses as fast as it would like, commenting after Kroger Co. the U.S. grocery chain, paused the rollout of new warehouses. Kroger is Ocado’s biggest customer.  

In Australia, Ocado has also faced some delays in opening a Melbourne-based warehouse for Australian supermarket Coles Group Ltd.

“We see this as bad news for Ocado as Canada has been performing well and adds to another partner who is pulling back (alongside Kroger and problems at Coles),” said William Woods, an analyst at Bernstein. “We think this is related to the weak rebound in online volumes across all markets which is challenging the unit economics of ramping the customer fulfillment centers.”

 

What AI Alliance members want Canada to prioritize

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

When more than 50 tech companies, universities and startups from around the world united to form the AI Alliance last December, much of the globe was still making sense of the rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

With regulators eyeing the technology and questions swirling about whether its use would amplify biases and discrimination, take people's jobs or even spell the end of humanity, the industry group was meant to parse through the worries and find practical ways to move forward with AI. 

About seven months later, the organization, led by IBM and Meta Platforms Inc., numbers roughly 100 members and has formed working groups to address everything from AI skills to safety.

The Canadian Press asked members what measures Canada should prioritize as AI evolves.

More risk, more reward

Abhishek Gupta, founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, considers Canada "the original home of AI." 

Some of the technology's pioneers, including Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, have done much of their work within the country. Long before AI was buzzy, Canada was a hotbed for research in the sector.

But Gupta is worried about the country's ability to turn AI into profits.

"Where we started to lose our edge, unfortunately, is in commercialization," he said.

Some of that stems from Canadian talent seeking higher pay in the U.S. and other countries, where Gupta has heard of engineers making just shy of $1 million a year. U.S. venture capital firms with deeper pockets — and an often bolder approach — can outspend those in Canada, further driving home-grown companies away, he said.

The pattern continues when investors sell part or all of their ownership in a company. Many Canadian founders have opted for an exit that hands their business to a firm outside of Canada because of how much money buyers are willing to pay elsewhere.

As an example of how AI talent has seeped out of the country, Gupta points to Element AI, a Montreal-based firm that created AI solutions for large organizations, which was sold to California-based ServiceNow in 2020. 

"It's not great that it didn't continue to remain a Canadian company ... because the big thing we want to see is, of course, a translation of research into commercial success," he said.

Jeremy Barnes, ElementAI's former chief technology officer and now vice-president of AI for ServiceNow, similarly laments how Canada has been unable to take advantage of the edge it once had.

To turn things around, he thinks the country has to stop being so conservative and VC firms need to focus less on protecting themselves from losses and more on how to "share in the benefits" of startups.

"You have got to put your chips in the game in order to be able to win the jackpot," he said.

Canada needs to look outside the "highly visible companies" and pour support into breakout businesses that are garnering less attention but have lots of potential, Barnes said.

The right guardrails

When the Alliance was founded, countries were already shaping their AI regulations. 

U.S. President Joe Biden had issued an executive order requiring AI developers to share safety test results and other information with the government and the European Union had implemented tough compliance requirements.

Manav Gupta, vice-president and chief technology officer at IBM Canada, likes the expediency with which the U.S. government moved and the EU policy because it's a layered approach that recognizes that AI systems tied to weapons, for example, carry very different risks than those involved in tasks like processing welfare claims.

He thinks the two policies have "championed the way" for other countries, acting as a benchmark for what AI regulations should look like worldwide.

Canada tabled an AI-centric bill in 2022, but it won't be implemented until at least 2025, so the country has resorted to a voluntary code of conduct, which IBM and a few dozen other companies have signed, in the meantime.

Any policy the country lands on, Gupta said, should have a "well-defined framework" with a tiered approach to risks.

"The greater the risk of the technology, the higher the grading of the risk and therefore, the greater the regulation and the greater transparency," he said.

The country should also be careful not to stray too far from the global direction regulations are taking on, said ServiceNow's Barnes.

"What it will do if it's done wrong is it will create friction, which makes it harder for Canadian companies to compete with others, so to some extent, the role of Canada can't be to go it alone."

Focus on open-source AI

As gains in AI become more frequent, Kevin Chan, global policy campaign strategies director at Facebook- and Instagram-owner Meta, is advocating for the tech industry to embrace the open-source model.

Open-source models mean the code underpinning the AI system is freely available for anyone to use, modify and build on, thus expanding access to AI, bolstering development and research and even bringing transparency to the technology.

"That's actually how innovation happens," Chan said of the open-source philosophy.

"We want to make sure that there is space that exists for people to choose to use open models so that we can get faster innovation, so that we can democratize this technology to more people."

Open-source models have their downsides though — people can use them to harm and when vulnerabilities become known, hackers can attack multiple systems at once — but Chan sees the approach as an opportunity.

"Open models are great for countries like Canada, who may not have the ... resources to build their own frontier models," he says. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 21, 2024.

Surveillance risks posed by AI among the technology's most urgent problems: Hinton

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has become synonymous with doomsday-like warnings that predict the technology could pose an existential threat, but on Wednesday, he put the spotlight on another risk he said is even more pressing for humanity.

"The existential threat is the one I've talked about the most, but that's not the most urgent part," he told a standing-room only audience at the Collision tech conference in Toronto. 

"I think surveillance is something to worry about. AI is going to be very good at surveillance."

It's of particular worry to the British-Canadian computer scientist because he believes it could help authoritarian regimes stay in power. In some instances, he thinks there will be few protections against these regimes, whose power sometimes even supreme courts can't counter.

AI's ability to spy on humanity's every move has long been on Hinton's lengthy list of worries he's rattled off at appearances over the last year designed to get the world thinking more cautiously about AI and considering what guardrails the technology needs as it explodes into usage at businesses and beyond.

The worries he named Wednesday include the rise of lethal autonomous weapons, which he said are coming soon, along with fake videos, corrupted elections, cybercrime and job losses that could increase the gap between the rich and poor.

There's also an "alignment problem" because humanity can't always agree on what is good and that could have repercussions when powerful technology is in our hands.

"Some people think it's good to drop 2,000-pound bombs on children and other people don't," he said.

"They've both got their reasons, but you can't align with both of them."

But the risk Hinton has bandied around that has generated the most attention is his sci-fi-like predictions that warn of battle robots and humanity's very existence being in peril because of AI.

The prognostications have divided the tech community with some saying an existential crisis is a far-off possibility and others thinking it won't materialize at all because humans will always be able to pull the plug on AI.

Hinton left his job at Google, which bought a neural network business he co-founded with two students in 2013, just as AI worries were swirling around his mind. 

"I left Google because I was 75. I wanted a break and to watch a lot of Netflix," he quipped.

"But also as I left Google, I figured I could just warn ... that in the long run, these things could get smarter than us and might go rogue. That's not science fiction like Aidan Gomez thinks. That's real."

Gomez is the co-founder of Cohere, a Toronto-based enterprise AI company Hinton has backed. He told the Collision audience on Tuesday that he feels the technology is not bound to exceed human capabilities any time soon, and if it does he's skeptical any sci-fi like scenarios will arise.

Asked how the world can counter AI's problems, Hinton conceded "for most things, I have no idea what they should do."

But on the matter of existential threat, he called on governments to conduct large safety experiments because they're "the only thing powerful enough to make the big companies invest significant amounts of money."

When it comes to fake videos and attempts at skewing elections, he also has an idea meant to "build up resistance" to AI-generated material spreading falsehoods. He said he recently shared the idea with billionaire philanthropists who solicited his advice.

"My suggestion was pay for a lot of advertisements where you have a very convincing fake video, and then right at the end of it say, 'This was a fake video,'" he said.

Hinton’s talk was the most anticipated at Collision, where organizers expected 37,832 people and a record number of female founders to take in talks over three days.

Hinton’s 20-minute appearance was slimmed down from the roughly hour-long interview he gave at the event the year before, but both talks were equally hyped.

His views carry considerable weight in the tech world because he won the A.M. Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, in 2018 with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, who disagrees with Hinton's existential threat theory.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2024.