EUGENE, OREGON (AP) – Will Richardson scored 23 of his career-high 26 points in the second half, Jacob Young had a season-high 22 points and Oregon rallied from a nine-point second-half deficit to beat Utah 79-66 yesterday.
De’Vion Harmon added 11 points for Oregon (8-6, 1-2 Pac-12).
The Ducks made just one of their first 10 field-goal attempts and trailed most of the first half before Both Gach hit a tjree-pointer to give Utah (8-6, 1-3) a 40-31 lead early in the second. Richardson and Young combined to score 15 points in a 17-2 run over the next 3 1/2 minutes that gave Oregon the lead for good.
Richardson, who finished 9-of-12 shooting and hit a career-high five three-pointers, scored Oregon’s first nine points in an 11-4 spurt that made it 67-57 when Young drove the left side of the lane and dropped a wrap-around pass to N’Faly Dante for a two-hand dunk with 5:22 to play. Young hit a three about 2 1/2 minutes later to push the lead into double figures for good.
Branden Carlson led the Utes with 15 points, Marco Anthony scored 14 and Lazar Stefanovic added 10. David Jenkins Jr, who scored 1,194 points in two years at South Dakota State before leading UNLV in scoring at 14.8 points per game last season, fouled out with seven minutes to play and was held scoreless for the first time in his career. The redshirt junior went into the game as Utah’s second-leading scorer at 12.7 per game while leading the Pac-12 in both made 3s (37) and 3-point field-goal percentage (.435).
Oregon seemed to crank up its defensive intensity in the second half, pressuring Utes ball handlers into turnovers and scoring 20 of the Ducks’ 22 fast-break points. They shot 18 of 28 (64.3 per cent) from the field and 6 of 8 from 3-point range while scoring 50 points after halftime.
The Ducks are 20-2 against Utah under coach Dana Altman and have won eight straight in the series.
De’Vion Harmon celebrates with Will Richardson and Jacob Young. PHOTO: AP
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Air travel continued to be severely disrupted in the United States on Saturday, with bad weather in parts of the country adding to the impact of a massive spike in COVID-19 infections fuelled by the Omicron variant.
The United States (US) had 2,723 cancelled flights, more than half of the 4,698 cancelled worldwide, around 1pm (0400 GMT yesterday), according to tracking website FlightAware.
In addition, 5,993 domestic flights were delayed on Saturday, out of a total of 11.043 worldwide for the day.
The worst affected US airline was SkyWest, which had to cancel 23 per cent of its flight schedule, according to the site.
In the US, airports in Chicago were particularly hard-hit because of bad weather, with a snowstorm on Saturday afternoon and into the night.
The global air travel industry is still reeling from the highly contagious Omicron variant.
Many pilots, flight attendants and other staff are absent from work after contracting COVID-19, or because they are quarantining after coming in contact with someone who has the infection.
Some 7,500 flights were cancelled by airlines worldwide over the Christmas weekend.
SHEDAI CAMP, AFGHANISTAN (AP) – In a sprawling settlement of mud brick huts in western Afghanistan housing people displaced by drought and war, a woman is fighting to save her daughter.
Aziz Gul’s husband sold the 10-year-old girl into marriage without telling his wife, taking a down-payment so he could feed his family of five children. Without that money, he told her, they would all starve. He had to sacrifice one to save the rest.
Many of Afghanistan’s growing number of destitute people are making desperate decisions such as these as their nation spirals into a vortex of poverty.
The aid-dependent country’s economy was already teetering when the Taleban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of United States (US) and NATO troops. The international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all funding, unwilling to work with a Taleban government given its reputation for brutality during its previous rule 20 years ago.
The consequences have been devastating for a country battered by four decades of war, a punishing drought and the coronavirus pandemic. Legions of state employees, including doctors, haven’t been paid in months. Malnutrition and poverty stalk the most vulnerable, and aid groups say more than half the population faces acute food shortages.
ABOVE & BELOWT: Fatima holds her four-year-old daughter Nazia, who is suffering from acute malnutrition; and Qandi Gul holds her brother outside their home housing those displaced by war and drought near Herat, Afghanistan. PHOTOS: AP
People gather near a makeshift clinic at a settlement housing those displaced by war and drought
“Day by day, the situation is deteriorating in this country, and especially children are suffering,” said Asuntha Charles, national director of the World Vision aid organisation in Afghanistan, which runs a health clinic for displaced people just outside the western city of Herat.
“Today I have been heartbroken to see that the families are willing to sell their children to feed other family members,” Charles said. “So it’s the right time for the humanitarian community to stand up and stay with the people of Afghanistan.”
Arranging marriages for very young girls is a frequent practice throughout the region. The groom’s family – often distant relatives – pays money to seal the deal, and the child usually stays with her own parents until she is at least around 15 or 16. Yet with many unable to afford even basic food, some say they’d allow prospective grooms to take very young girls or are even trying to sell their sons.
But Gul, unusually in this deeply patriarchal, male-dominated society, is resisting. Married off herself at 15, she said she would kill herself if her daughter, Qandi Gul, is forcibly taken away.
Gul remembers well the moment she found out her husband had sold Qandi. For around two months, the family had been able to eat. Eventually, she asked her husband where the money came from, and he told her.
“My heart stopped beating. I wished I could have died at that time, but maybe God didn’t want me to die,” Gul said. Qandi sat close to her mother, her hazel eyes peering shyly from beneath her sky-blue headscarf. “Each time I remember that night … I die and come back to life. It was so difficult.”
She asked her husband why he did it.
“He said he wanted to sell one and save the others. ‘You all would have died this way’, (he said.) I told him, ‘Dying was much better than what you have done’.”
Gul rallied her community, telling her brother and village elders that her husband had sold her child behind her back. They supported her, and with their help she secured a “divorce” for her child, but only on condition she repays the AFN100,000 (about USD1,000) that her husband received.
It’s money she doesn’t have. Her husband fled, possibly fearing Gul might denounce him to the authorities. The Taleban government recently announced a ban on forcing women into marriage or using women and girls as exchange tokens to settle disputes.
The family of the prospective groom, a man of around 21 or 22, has already tried several times to claim the girl, she said. She is not sure how long she can fend them off.
“I am just so desperate. If I can’t provide money to pay these people and can’t keep my daughter by my side, I have said that I will kill myself,” Gul said. “But then I think about the other children. What will happen to them? Who will feed them?” Her eldest is 12, her youngest – her sixth – just two months.
Now alone, Gul leaves the children with her elderly mother while she goes to work in people’s homes. Her 12-year-old son works picking saffron after school. It’s barely enough to keep them fed, and the saffron season is short, only a few weeks in the fall.
“We don’t have anything,” Gul said.
In another part of the same camp, father-of-four Hamid Abdullah was also selling his young daughters into arranged marriages, desperate for money to treat his chronically ill wife, pregnant with their fifth child.
Abdullah borrowed money to pay for his wife’s treatments and can’t pay it back, he said. So three years ago, he received a down-payment for his eldest daughter Hoshran, now seven, in an arranged marriage to an 18-year-old in their native Badghis province. He’s now looking for someone to buy his second daughter, six-year-old Nazia.
“We don’t have food to eat,” Abdullah explained, adding he also had to buy medicine for his wife, who soon would need more treatment. “She needs another surgery, I don’t have one afghani to pay for the doctor.”
The family that bought Hoshran is waiting until she is older before the full amount is settled, he explained.
But he needs money now for food and treatments, so he is trying to arrange a marriage for Nazia for about AFN20,000-AFN30,000.
“What should we do? We have to do it, we have no other option,” said his wife, Bibi Jan. “When we made the decision, it was like someone had taken away a body part from me.”
In the neighbouring province of Badghis, another displaced family is considering selling their son, eight-year-old Salahuddin.
His mother, Guldasta, said that after days with nothing to eat, she told her husband to take the boy to the bazaar and sell him to bring food for the others.
“I don’t want to sell my son, but I have to,” the 35-year-old said. “No mother can do this to her child, but when you have no other choice, you have to make a decision against your will.”
Salahuddin blinked and looked on silently. Surrounded by some of his seven brothers and sisters, his lip quivered slightly.
His father, Shakir, who is blind in one eye and has kidney problems, said the children had been crying for days from hunger. Twice, he said, he decided to take the boy to the bazaar and twice he faltered, unable to go through with it. “But now I think I have no other choice than to sell him.”
Buying of boys is believed to be less common than girls, and when it does take place, it appears to be cases of infant boys bought by families who don’t have any sons. In her despair, Guldasta thought perhaps such a family would want an eight-year-old.
The desperation of millions is clear as more and more people face hunger. By the end of the year, some 3.2 million children under five years old are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the United Nations (UN).
Nazia is one of them. The four-year-old lay listlessly in her mother’s arms after visiting the World Vision health clinic.
Two years ago, Nazia was a plump toddler, her mother Fatima said. Now, her emaciated limbs are just skin covering bone. Her little heart beats visibly beneath her ribcage.
“The prices are high. Flour is expensive, cooking oil is expensive, everything is expensive,” Fatima said. “All day she is asking me to give her meat, yogurt and fruit. We don’t have anything, and we don’t have money to buy it for her.”
Charles, World Vision’s national director for Afghanistan, said humanitarian aid funds are desperately needed.
“I’m happy to see the pledges are made,” she said. But the pledges “shouldn’t stay as promises, they have to be seen as reality on the ground”.
THE WASHINGTON POST – The outrageousness of the case against Mahmood Hussein Mattan still burns: In 1952, Mattan, a former merchant seaman, was arrested for slitting the throat of a shopkeeper in Cardiff, Wales. His murder trial was riddled with lies and suppressed evidence. His own defence lawyer described him in court as a “semicivilised savage”.
And then Mattan was hanged.
For more than four decades afterward, the wheels of justice turned excruciatingly slowly. But in 1998, the Court of Appeal overturned Mattan’s conviction and awarded his family GBP725,000 as compensation. Although there can be no restitution for the unjustly executed man, his ordeal is the subject of an extraordinary novel that insists on his innate value and exposes the system that killed him. The Fortune Men, by a Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed, was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize.
As a work of historical fiction, Mohamed’s novel is equally informative and moving. While the details of her story are drawn from news accounts and court records, the interior portraits stem from her own deeply sympathetic imagination. The resulting confluence of fact and fiction provides a damning indictment of judicial racism. But with a vision that exceeds this one tragic case, The Fortune Men also plumbs the existential plight of so many similar victims.
The immediate allure of the novel is the vibrancy of Mohamed’s prose, her ability to capture the complicated culture of Cardiff and the sound of tortured optimism. Born in British Somaliland, her doomed hero, Mahmood, came to Wales as a merchant seaman – one of the vast army of men drawn to the work after World War II. But when the story opens, he hasn’t sailed for three years. These days the bustling area of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay comprises his whole world, a realm of opportunities constantly out of reach.
“It’s hopeless,” he thinks at age 24. The White employers of this town will “only ever see him like one of those grimy coolies in loincloths, or jungle savages, shrieking before their quick, unmourned deaths – or at best, a tight-lipped houseboy.”
Hovering close to Mahmood’s thoughts, The Fortune Men conveys the mix of deprivation and harassment that exhausts unemployed labourers. “He’s sick of dealing with the police,” Mohamed wrote, “feeling the rattle of their bracelets around his wrists, sharing mattresses with the city’s vagrants and derelicts. He’s too old for this and they, the police, are beginning to hate him; there’s something personal brewing there, they speak his name too freely, and want to believe he is capable of anything”.
Reduced to petty crimes and working on “poky little boilers in prisons and hospitals”, he repeatedly wastes his meager savings and then wonders why his estranged wife finds him so exasperating.
“Mahmood still can’t accept that he is just another uncared-for man eating from a plate on his lap in the solitude of a cold rented room,” Mohamed wrote. “Meals are just another thing he has to do by himself, for himself. Everything with just his own damned hand.”
There’s the crux of Mohamed’s artistry: Her clear-eyed acknowledgment of this man’s self-pity runs parallel to her piercing exposure of his society’s relentless, enervating prejudice.
Yes, she suggested, Mahmood is a flawed, sometimes foolish man – which is to say, he’s an actual human being. And his humanity is eventually what makes him so vulnerable to the machinations of corrupt policemen.
The horrific finale of The Fortune Men is never in doubt, but for more than 200 pages Mohamed still creates a sharp sense of suspense by pulling us right into Mahmood’s world as his life tilts and then crashes. From his point of view, it’s an unthinkable calamity. After all, he was arrested merely for fencing a shoplifted coat. He can’t fathom why his interrogators keep mentioning a murdered shopkeeper. Confronted with fabricated testimony, “Mahmood stumbles, his English is fracturing, words of Somali, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili and English clotting at once on his tongue.”
To the officers determined to convict him, he becomes a wild man, sputtering gibberish.
Despite Mohamed’s fidelity to the knocks and humiliations endured by Cardiff’s immigrant labourers, there’s a natural grandeur to her portrayal of this ordinary man caught in the city’s gears. Readers will hear echoes of Dostoevsky and Kafka in her re-creation of this nightmare. “You’ll hang, whether you did it or not,” someone tells Mahmood as he sails on toward execution like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Convinced that he’s a noble outlaw, a principled thief, he can’t entirely admit the peril of his situation. Asked at his arraignment if he needs legal aid to pay for a solicitor to defend him, Mahmood snaps, “Defend me for what? I don’t want anything and I don’t care anything. You people talking crazy. You can’t get me to worrying.” Ironically, he’s so indoctrinated in the mythology of the United Kingdom that he can’t shake his faith that the court will ultimately save him.
The intensity of Mahmood’s tragedy is leavened by a very different tragedy that runs through the novel. In alternate sections, we get to know Violet, the owner of a modest shop in Cardiff.
“Nowhere feels safe any more,” she thinks. What has she and her family won by living in Cardiff, where their store is repeatedly vandalised and robbed? And then – the most devastating outrage of all – Violet’s throat is slit while her sister eats dinner next door. It’s no solace to her family that the police are determined to punish an innocent man.
Listening to the witnesses deliver their false testimonies, Mahmood is aghast at the skewed image of him. “They are blind,” he thinks, “to Mahmood Hussein Mattan and all his real manifestations: the tireless stoker, the elegant Wanderer, the love-starved husband, the soft-hearted father.”
UPI – A Florida family’s doorbell camera captured the moment a mother bear and her cub attempted to open the front door of their home.
Marlene Stark said she was at her home in Sanford when her Ring doorbell camera alerted her to movement on the front stoop.
“We didn’t know it was bears, initially. So, we ran to the front door and said, ‘Oh my goodness’, and then we immediately threw the bolt lock,” Stark told WOFL-TV.
Stark said it was surprising to see a mother bear and her cub on her front stoop, although the animals are known to wander the area.
“Our neighbourhood is down the road from Black Bear Wilderness Preserve, so bears are common, and we have seen them in the neighbourhood,” she told Fox News.
Stark said she was shocked to see one of the bears attempt to open the front door.
“I had no idea that they had that capability to open the front door. So, I’m glad it was locked,” she said.
Stark said she doesn’t know why the bears attempted to get into her home, although others have suggested the animals may have been attracted to the smell of her cooking.
“I was just making a roast, the pan was covered,” she said. “It wasn’t outside, so I don’t know.”
MELBOURNE (AFP) – Australian Open boss Craig Tiley said yesterday there was still “quite a bit to play out” on whether Novak Djokovic (AFP pic above) will defend his title in Melbourne, with a clearer picture “in the coming days”.
The 20-time Grand Slam champion refused to confirm if he has been vaccinated against Covid-19 and withdrew from the ATP Cup in Sydney this week without giving a reason. Participants at the opening Grand Slam of the year, which starts on January 17, need to be vaccinated or have a medical exemption.
There is speculation that Djokovic has applied for one, which would be assessed by an independent panel of experts and remain confidential.
Tiley said the clock was ticking.
“We’ve still got a few charter flights coming in until the end of this week and then all the players will be here,” he told the Nine Network.
“As far as the status relates to Novak, I think we’ll have a much clearer picture in the coming days otherwise it’s getting pretty late to show up and play the Australian Open.”
“There’s quite a bit to play out and I think it will play out in the coming days,” he added.
Government officials in Victoria state, which hosts the Australian Open, have been adamant for months that only vaccinated players can play the tournament.
“They’re the rules. Medical exemptions are just that – it’s not a loophole for privileged tennis players,” the state’s Deputy Premier James Merlino said in December.
Djokovic’s arch-rival Rafael Nadal, who is also gunning for record 21st Grand Slam title, is already in Melbourne preparing after recovering from the coronavirus.
Fellow 20-time Grand Slam winner Roger Federer is sidelined by injury.
Jeep Owners Group Brunei (JOGB) marked the group’s first outing for 2022 with a breakfast get-together at Seri Kenangan Beach, Tutong District yesterday.
Dubbed ‘GHK2022 JOGB Topless Breakfast Gathering’, the event served as an ice-breaker while ushering in the new year among JOGB members and their families, after missing out on several activities last year due to the second wave of COVID-19 outbreak.
JOGB activity coordinator Halim said the gathering kicked off a series of activities for this year, including annual activities such as off-road and charity convoy rides, family outings and community outreach programmes.
“We will plan for the off-road activities to be conducted locally. However, if the border restrictions are lifted, we might plan to go on our usual adventures and off-road driving in Sabah and Sarawak, depending on the pandemic situation in the neighbouring Malaysian states,” he said.
Meanwhile, the members had the opportunity to catch up with one another, most of whom had not met for several months. They also had a sharing session on Jeeps vehicles and a display of their rides.
JOGB has been organising events since its establishment several years ago. As the authorised distributor of Jeep vehicles in the Sultanate, GHK Motors has been supporting their activities through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, including yesterday’s gathering.
Members of the Jeep Owners Group Brunei at Seri Kenangan Beach in Tutong District. PHOTO: LYNA MOHAMAD
HAIKOU (XINHUA) – Offshore duty-free sales in south China’s island province of Hainan reached CY60.2 billion (about USD9.4 billion) in 2021, an increase of 84 per cent year on year, said the Provincial Department of Commerce.
According to the department, the number of shoppers totaled nearly 9.7 million in 2021, with about 53.5 million items purchased, up 73 per cent and 71 per cent year-on-year, respectively.
Three more duty-free shops opened last year in Hainan, raising the total number to 10.
The duty-free shops host more than 720 brands in a total shopping area of 220,000 square metres.
Since July 1, 2020, Hainan has raised its annual tax-free shopping quota from CY30,000 to CY100,000 per person. The duty-free purchase limit for cosmetics has been raised from 12 items to 30.
The province has also rolled out a range of policies such as flexible pick-up services to provide a better experience for customers.
China released a master plan in June 2020 to build the island province into a globally influential and high-level free trade port by the middle of the century.
THE WASHINGTON POST – Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel about the rise and fall of a con man – previously adapted for the screen in 1947 – Guillermo del Toro’s noirish-to-the-point-of-misanthropic, gorgeously atmospheric Nightmare Alley may be the filmmaker’s best-looking film yet, as well as the one with the most sour outlook on humanity.
Every other outdoor scene seems staged in driving rain or gently falling snow, or under the kind of spooky sky that Ray Bradbury once described as “orange and ash gray at twilight” in the opening pages of his Something Wicked This Way Comes. Like Nightmare, Bradbury’s novel was also a story set in the colourful, creepy, menacing world of a travelling carnival, and featuring a cast of outsiders and freaks.
Nightmare begins in that world, against the backdrop of World War II, with the arrival of Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a handsome, charismatic drifter who parlays some quick manual labour for carnival boss Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) into a regular job. Stan’s a quick study, and he’s soon picking up the tricks of the trade, particularly the mind-reading act of Zeena (Toni Collette) and her husband Pete (David Strathairn).
But Stan’s too good for this world – or, rather, he’s too talented for it: Later, the protagonist makes a point of telling us he’s no good, and you’d do well to believe him.
Eventually, Stan leaves for the big time with his new bride Molly (Rooney Mara), a fellow carny who becomes his assistant in a slick mentalist act they develop for the urbane audiences in Chicago.
ABOVE & BELOW: Bradley Cooper in a scene from ‘Nightmare Alley’; Ron Perlman, right, and Mark Povinelli in a scene from the movie. PHOTOS: THE WASHINGTON POST
When Stan meets a seductive psychiatrist, Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), his small cons give way to a big one.
Together, Stan and Lilith – whose clientele includes a powerful, violent yet credulous mobster named Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins) – hatch a plan for Stan to pass himself off as a spiritualist medium.
In this new grift, known in the parlance of the film as a “spook show”, Stan claims to be able to summon the dead: specifically the spirit of Ezra’s old mistress, who died after a botched abortion.
As the focus of the story shifts to their dangerous flimflam, Nightmare Alley loses a bit of steam.
Cooper, Blanchett, Jenkins and Mara – whose character Stan enlists to play the dead girl – are uniformly excellent. (Molly is the film’s moral centre, in a story in which there are no real heroes).
But away from the carnival, you start to miss the almost pitiable charlatans, grifters and liars of that demimonde, replaced by villains of a more conventional – and hence more familiar – bent. Nicely adapted from Gresham’s book by del Toro and Kim Morgan, Nightmare never wholly leaves behind the sordid milieu of the carnival.
Even in its most sophisticated settings, it’s never very far away from what Clem calls the “nightmare alleys, train tracks and flophouses” in which he recruits drunks to play his “geeks”: sad, doomed losers who bite the heads off live chickens in front of shocked yet mesmerised carnival audiences, just to be kept soused enough not to care.
Nightmare Alley is a cautionary tale, an allegory of ambition, hubris and despair. No matter how far Stan climbs up the ladder of high society, you know he’s going to fall. And, as with the geek, there’s a certain perverse satisfaction in watching him when he does.
In something of a departure for del Torro, this is not a horror film or a story of the supernatural. But it does have the filmmaker’s shocking, sometimes needlessly bloody DNA all over it.
It’s a noir tale for contemporary audiences who have developed an appetite for sensation from comic book movies, not literature.
The film doesn’t need all that spectacle, and it is at its best when it is at its simplest, relying on the power of storytelling and vivid language, not gory effects.
Nightmare Alley conjures a colourful world – a world of the Odditorium and the House of Damnation, as the carnival’s signs scream, in lurid reds and acid greens. But it is really, at its heart, an old-fashioned fable, a fairy tale for grown ups.
“People will pay good money just to make themselves feel better,” Clem tells Stan, at one point, about the gullibility of his customers. In the case of Nightmare Alley, you will – and you should – fork over the cost of a movie ticket, just to make yourself feel bad.
SEOUL (AFP) – An unidentified person entered North Korea from the South on New Year’s Day, the military in Seoul said yesterday, a rare breach of the heavily fortified border between the neighbours.
Years of repression and poverty in North Korea have led more than 30,000 people to flee to the South in the decades since the Korean War, but crossings in the other direction are extremely rare.
The person was detected by surveillance equipment in the Demilitarised Zone – which divides the Korean peninsula – at 9.20pm local time on Saturday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said. It sparked a search operation by the military, but to no avail.
“It was confirmed the person crossed the Military Demarcation Line into the North,” it added.
The person has not been identified yet, a JCS official told reporters, adding South Korean authorities sent a message to the North yesterday regarding the incident.
No unusual activity by the North Korean military has been detected, he said.
In 2020, North Korean troops shot dead and burned the body of a South Korean fisheries official Pyongyang said had illegally crossed the maritime border.
In the same year, a North Korean who had defected to the South three years earlier sneaked back across the heavily fortified border.
