HANOI (XINHUA) – Vietnam reported 131,713 new COVID-19 cases yesterday, down 9,438 cases from Sunday, according to its Ministry of Health (MoH).
The new infections, logged in 63 localities nationwide, included 131,709 domestically transmitted and four imported.
Vietnamese capital Hanoi remained the epidemic hotspot with 17,916 cases yesterday, followed by central Nghe An province with 5,403 cases, and northern Phu Tho province with 5,348 cases.
The infections brought the total tally to 8,089,761, with 41,949 deaths. Nationwide, 4,282,668 COVID-19 patients, or 53 per cent of the infections, have recovered.
More than 201.8 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the country, including 184.8 million shots on people aged 18 and above, said the ministry.
Vietnam has gone through four coronavirus waves of increasing scale, complication, and infectivity. As of yesterday, it has registered nearly 8.1 million locally transmitted COVID-19 cases since the start of the current wave in April 2021, said the Health Ministry.
A woman walking along a street in Hanoi, Vietnam. PHOTO: AFP
LOS ANGELES (AP) – CODA won the top prize at Saturday night’s Producers Guild Awards (PGA), giving momentum to the possibility that the small film could have a big night at the Oscars.
The story of three adult family members who are deaf and a fourth who is not and seeks a singing career beat out bigger contenders including The Power of the Dog, Dune and West Side Story to take an award that – more often than not – goes on to win the Academy Award for best picture.
“This movie has been an amazing ride, it was such a special one to make, there was so much love and so much heart put into it,” said Fabrice Gianfermi as he accepted the award with his CODA co-producers Philippe Rousselet and Patrick Wachsberger at the 33rd PGA Awards.
An American Sign Language translator, who had been off to one side of the stage throughout the night’s speeches, stood front and centre during the CODA acceptance and another stood in front of the stage to translate for the three actors from the film who are deaf: Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant.
CODA, an acronym for ‘children of deaf adults’, is nominated for three Oscars at the March 27 ceremony, including best adapted screenplay for writer-director Sian Heder and best supporting actor for Kotsur, who is expected by most to become the first actor who is deaf since Matlin in 1987 to win an Oscar.
ABOVE & BELOW: Rita Moreno accepts the Stanley Kramer Award at the 33rd annual Producers Guild Awards; and the Producing team and cast of ‘CODA’ accept the Darryl F Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures. PHOTOS: AP
ABOVE & BELOW: Yvett Merino and Clark Spencer accept the award for outstanding producer of animated theatrical motion pictures for ‘Encanto’; and Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson arrive at the 33rd annual Producers Guild Awards
After it won best ensemble at last month’s Screen Actors Guild Awards it began to appear CODA could get real consideration for best picture. The odds may be getting better. The top PGA award winner has gone on to win the top Oscar in three of the past four years and 10 of the past 13. Academy Award voting closes today.
The PGA Awards, an untelevised show from the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles honouring producers of film and television, is as much like a company awards banquet as a typical awards show, with no speeches cut short for time.
“Producing some is really hard,” said Issa Rae, producer of Insecure and A Black Lady Sketch Show as she accepted the guild’s Visionary Award.
Ninety-year-old Rita Moreno, star of the both the 1961 and 2021 versions of West Side Story, accepted the guild’s Stanley Kramer Award, which honours someone who has combined a career of artistry and activism.
“This business has taken tenacity and hard work,” Moreno said. “Advocating for issues of social justice for the last 60 years, it’s been exhausting, exhilarating and life-giving.”
Moreno said the night itself was both joyful and exhausting after taking the stage at 11pm local time, nearly three hours into the show.
“I was really getting tired,” she said. “My buttocks are a bit sore.”
George Lucas and Kathleen Kennedy, stewards of the Star Wars universe and producers of many other notable motion pictures, were honoured for their careers with the PGA’s Milestone Award.
Presenter Steven Spielberg, whose films have produced by both Lucas and Kennedy, called them “two titans” who are “still just like kids playing in a sandbox”.
Lucas acknowledged that his favourite achievement may not be the most popular among his peers, including the one who introduced him last Saturday.
“The thing I’m the most proud of is digital cinema. That was something that I worked on for 20 years. Spent many many millions of dollars to make it happen,” Lucas said. “Some still don’t believe in it. Where’s Steven?”
Spielberg, standing in the wings, acted out the operation of a traditional film camera, to laughs from the crowd.
“But we’re all friends,” Lucas said.
Summer of Soul won the PGA’s documentary film category and Encanto won the award for animated movies. Both are also nominated for Oscars.
In the PGA’s television categories, awards went to the producers of Succession, Mare of Easttown and Ted Lasso.
Greg Berlanti, producer of shows including Dawson’s Creek and several series from the DC comic universe, was given the guild’s Norman Lear Award.
Outgoing co-presidents of the guild Gail Berman and Lucy Fisher were tearful as they expressed joy that they could finally see their gathered peers in person after two years during which the pandemic forced the show to go virtual.
They praised their fellow producers for keeping the industry alive during their tough tenure.
“Hollywood loves a comeback story,” Fisher said, “and boy, yours is one for the ages.”
SYDNEY (CNA) – Australia’s media regulator will be able to force Internet companies to provide internal data about how they have handled misinformation and disinformation, the latest measure by the country’s government to crack down on Big Tech.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will also be able to enforce an Internet industry code on uncooperative platforms, the federal government said yesterday, joining governments around the world seeking to reduce the spread of harmful falsehoods online.
The planned laws are a response to an ACMA report that found four-fifths of Australian adults had experienced misinformation about COVID-19 and 76 per cent thought online platforms should do more to cut the amount of false and misleading content shared online.
The laws broadly align with efforts by Europe to curb damaging online content, which are due to take effect by the end of 2022, although the European Union (EU) has said it wants even tougher measures to stop disinformation given some claims by Russian state-owned media during the invasion of Ukraine.
The crackdown also comes as Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison faces what is expected to be a tight federal election next month, with his conservative Liberal Party-led coalition currently lagging the main opposition Labour Party in the polls.
“Digital platforms must take responsibility for what is on their sites and take action when harmful or misleading content appears,” Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said in a statement.
Australians were most likely to see misinformation on larger services like Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Twitter Inc, the ACMA report said. False narratives typically started with “highly emotive and engaging posts within small online conspiracy groups” and were “amplified by international influencers, local public figures, and by coverage in the media”, it added.
The report also noted disinformation, which involves intentionally spreading false information to influence politics or sow discord, was continuing to target Australians. Facebook had removed four disinformation campaigns in Australia from 2019 to 2020, it said.
The report noted conspiracy groups often urged people to join smaller platforms with looser moderation policies, like Telegram. If those platforms rejected industry-set content guidelines, “they may present a higher risk to the Australian community”, ACMA said.
DIGI, an Australian industry body representing Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Twitter and video site TikTok, said it supported the recommendations and noted it had already set up a system to process complaints about misinformation.
THE WASHINGTON POST – The cleverly punctuated title of Dennis Duncan’s book, Index, A History of the, should signal that this isn’t a dry account of a small cogwheel in the publishing machine. Instead, it is an engaging tale of the long search for the quickest way to find what you need in those big, information-rich things called books. It is indeed an adventure, and “bookish” in the most appealing sense.
Indexes – or indices, to use the Latinate form – are taken for granted today, but it took millennia for them to achieve their current lowly, anonymous status. (Freelance professionals create most indexes, not authors). After some introductory remarks, Duncan, a British academic and translator, takes us back to the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC. To identify the hundreds of thousands rolled-up scrolls, Egyptian librarians attached tags that not only identified the author and title but also itemised the contents. Not an index, but a start.
It was a religious book that birthed the index. In the Middle Ages, preachers and theologians needed a quick way to locate certain passages, so, beginning in the 13th Century, monks met that need by constructing prototypes of the index, organised either by phrases, keywords or themes. They were keyed to chapter and verse, and by the end of the century, pages numbers came into use. Those locaters (as they’re called in the indexing biz) would allow books to be indexed, especially after the printing press was invented. Duncan goes into fascinating detail about all this – page numbers get an entire chapter of their own – with digressions into curious byways of booklore and literature.
By the 16th Century, the index was in general use, but subject to misuse as well. Some lazy readers began asking, “What is to be gained by reading a book if everything in it is more succinctly expressed in the index?” and some scholars became denigrated as “index-rakers” who possessed only “index-learning”. Questions arose on how detailed an index should be. As a freelance indexer, I can attest that this issue persists to this day: I had one client who wished every noun in his book could be indexed, and I’ve often had to point out to authors that an index is not a concordance (which lists every word in a book in alphabetical order).
Bias soon entered the fray: “Let no Tory index my History!” Lord Macaulay cried, fearful that his Whig politics would be misrepresented. An index should be objective, but some indexers can’t resist expressing subjective judgements, or even mocking a book’s contents with facetious or insulting entries. One entry in Duncan’s mischievous index reads: Google, making us stupid 9, 118.
Other misuses involve vanity and flattery. Duncan tells the famous story about William F Buckley Jr sending his latest book to Norman Mailer with the word “Hi!” scribbled next to Mailer’s entry in the index, knowing the vain author would look there. I’ve been told by scholars that the first thing some academics do with a new book in their field is turn to the index to see if they’re mentioned, and will dismiss the book if not, and consequently ask me to include certain people in the index even if they are merely mentioned in passing.
It wasn’t long before fiction writers saw the potential of the index form, and Duncan’s sixth chapter provides a few examples, beginning with Samuel Richardson’s use of one (at Samuel Johnson’s urging) to those in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with special attention to the cunning one in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. This chapter is rather skimpy: there are dozens of other novels with indexes, even stories and entire novels in the form of an index, such as JG Ballard’s Paris Review article The Index, which Duncan discusses, and Suzanne Scanlon’s book Her 37th Year: An Index (2015).
Duncan concludes his history with far-ranging discussions of the enormous impact on indexing of computer technology and the Internet. Thanks to writing software and searchable PDFs of proofs, the physical job of indexing is so much easier. Indexing software is now available, but some find it cumbersome, and its mindless output requires editing. The software is bound to improve, but a discerning indexer will always be needed to clean up the results.
Search engines have figuratively turned the entire universe into a searchable text, but that requires an even greater need for discrimination. When I typed ‘Dennis Duncan’ into Google Search, I got over 20 million hits; even adding “index” to his name returned 147 sites, of which only about two dozen were relevant. Nor is the search feature on e-readers any substitute for a handmade, well-organised index.
From ancient Egypt to Silicon Valley, Duncan is an ideal tour guide: witty, engaging, knowledgeable and a fount of diverting anecdotes. The book skews toward the literary, but anyone interested in the 2,200-year journey to quickly find what one needs in a book will be enlightened, and will never again take an index for granted. The well-designed book also includes nearly 40 illustrations. As might be expected, the index – created not by the author but by Paula Clarke Bain – is magnificent.
MACEIO, BRAZIL (AP) – This part of Maceio, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern Alagoas state, used to buzz with the sounds of cars, commerce and children playing. It went silent as residents evacuated en masse, eager to escape the looming destruction of their homes, which were cracking and crumbling.
Beneath their floors, the subsurface was riddled with dozens of cavities: the legacy of four decades of rock salt mining in five urban neighbourhoods. That caused the soil above to settle and structures atop it to start coming apart. Since 2020, the communities have hollowed out as tens of thousands of residents accepted payouts from petrochemical company Braskem to relocate.
Few holdouts remain, several of whom told the Associated Press they imagine the ground under their feet resembling Swiss cheese. Still, Paulo Sergio Doe, 51, said he will never leave his home in the Pinheiro neighbourhood where he grew up.
“The company can’t impose what it wants overnight to do away with the lives and histories of so many families,” he said in an interview outside his home.
Braskem is one of the biggest petrochemical companies in the Americas, owned primarily by Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras and construction giant Novonor, formerly known as Odebrecht.
The company isn’t forcibly evicting anyone, though those still here said it feels that way. It reached an agreement with prosecutors and public defenders to compensate families so they could uproot and start over elsewhere. By Braskem’s count, 97.4 per cent of affected homes – more than 14,000 – are now vacant, the company said in its 2021 earnings call last Thursday.
Homes stand abandoned in the Bom Parto neighbourhood of Maceio, Alagoas state, Brazil. PHOTOS: APABOVE & BELOW: A woman stands in the doorway of her home; and children play in a pond
ABOVE & BELOW: The Braskem mining facility in Maceio; and escape route signs placed by the company line the side of a road in case of a catastrophic event arising from mining activities
The 55,000 evacuees left behind not just neighbours and friends, but also jobs; 4,500 mostly small- and medium-sized businesses that sustained 30,000 people were shuttered, according to a study The Federal University of Alagoas published last year. Among those businesses were local supermarkets and a ballet school that operated for 38 years, according to Adriana Capretz, part of the university’s work group to monitor the neighbourhoods.
The exodus is evident from above; departing residents salvaged everything they could sell for extra cash, including their roof tiles. Their removal allows unimpeded views inside the once-occupied spaces.
The amount Braskem offered wasn’t enough for Natalícia Gonçalves. The retired teacher, 77, also said she felt too old to start fresh. So she watched as everyone in Pinheiro left her. Now she lives inside a makeshift fortress behind boards and plants aimed at deterring would-be burglars. Braskem security guards do rounds on motorcycles, briefly interrupting the evenings’ eerie silence.
“They’ve already done everything to force me to go, but I have my rights,” she said from behind her home’s fortified exterior. “I’m afraid, especially at night when no one is around. The light is dim, there’s hardly any. I protect myself with my plants, but I’m alone, with God.”
Braskem has so far disbursed about 40 per cent of the more than BRL5 billion (about USD1 billion) it has set aside for relocation, compensation of individuals including residents and local employees and the transfer of facilities like schools and hospitals, the company said in its earnings call. It is directing BRL6 billion more for closing and monitoring the salt mines, as well as social, environmental and urbanistic measures.
Wrapping up the call, Braskem Chief Executive Officer Roberto Lopes Pontes Simões highlighted the company’s year, including “all the advance we had in Maceio” in having relocated nearly everyone from the neighbourhoods.
No house has been swallowed by the earth, nor was any person killed. , Professor in the university’s architecture and urbanism school, Capretz, said that doesn’t mean heartache was avoided. “The tragedy is happening, not just regarding the geological phenomena but, primarily, because there are cases of people who committed suicide, many who became sick with depression, lost their social lives, family ties, friends and neighbours,” Capretz said as she walked through the Bebedouro neighbourhood. “None of that is being considered by Braskem.”
The company’s press office said in a lengthy response to AP questions that it provides free psychological consultations to any residents participating in the compensation and relocation programme. It said the programme was created based on law and legal rulings in similar cases and said compensation offers are always presented to individuals alongside their lawyer or a public defender.
But negotiations can be clouded by sentiment; the price of a house isn’t the same as the value of a home.
Quitéria Maria da Silva, 64, and her grandson were waiting for the rest of their family to come play dominos on a table they set up beneath the only lamppost on their street that’s still functional. Even as da Silva said she would move were Braskem to pay her requested amount, she expressed ambivalence:
“I always lived in my house and now, if I have to leave here, where will I go?”
The Intermediate Court sentenced local Muhammad Rezal bin Meyasin to three years and four months of jail, with two strokes of the cane for theft and housebreaking yesterday.
Muhammad Rezal, 33, pleaded guilty to breaking into a store selling fishing equipment amid COVID-19 movement restrictions and making off with over BND8,000 worth of items.
Prosecutor Syafina Abdul Hadzid said the defendant travelled by boat with an accomplice during the wee hours from Sungai Gadong to Sungai Berakas and arrived at the store at a commercial area around 4am on January 25. The defendant went to the garage behind the shop and loosened a light bulb to make the area darker.
The defendant’s accomplice then forced open the back door of the store while he kept a lookout. The defendant stole over 40 items of fishing equipment and fled the scene by boat.
The theft was discovered by a shop assistant in the morning and a police report was lodged by the manager.
Footage from the shop’s CCTV aided police investigation and led to the defendant’s arrest. Most of the stolen items were not recovered.
On handing the sentence to the defendant, Judge Pengiran Hajah Norismayanti binti Pengiran Haji Ismail reflected on the defendant’s previous criminal record.
The judge said that the defendant’s criminal act had progressed since he was also convicted for theft in March 2019.
“The court observes the need to not just hand a mere punishment to the defendant, but also a deterrent one,” said the judge.
MATINICUS ISLAND, MAINE (AP) – There’s an Island of Misfit Toys in the popular holiday classic. Now there’s an island for unwanted and banned books, too.
The tiny library on Matinicus Island 35 kilometres off the Maine coast is on a mission to fill its shelves with books that have fallen out of favour elsewhere.
From And Tango Makes Three, the story of two male penguins that raised a chick together, to classics like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, all books are welcome including those that are being banned or cancelled in other parts of the country.
Eva Murray recently returned from a trip to the mainland with a bunch of books including And Tango Makes Three, which the American Library Association said is one of the most banned books in the country.
“We are buying banned books in order to publicly push back against the impetus to ban books. To say, ‘If you don’t want it in your library, we want it in ours,’” Murray told the Bangor Daily News.
For years, islanders just traded books among themselves, but they decided to create a grassroots library in 2016 in a donated storage shed.
It expanded in 2020 to add a second shed for a children’s library with help from a grant from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation.
Travel restrictions are always under review, said Minister at the Prime Minister’s Office and Minister of Finance and Economy II Dato Seri Setia Dr Awang Haji Mohd Amin Liew bin Abdullah when asked if there were plans to ease travel restrictions, at a press conference yesterday.
The media inquired on the impact of import cases on the COVID-19 situation in the country and if there are plans to ease travel restrictions, reflecting that local transmissions made up most of COVID-19 cases.
The minister said statistics indicated that transmissions due to imported COVID-19 cases were at a rate of 0.5 per cent, which is relatively low compared to the total COVID-19 transmissions in the country as a whole.
The minister reiterated that the policies covering travel restrictions or its easing are always under review and assured that changes will be made in due time.
POLAND/WASHINGTON (AP) – United States (US) President Joe Biden has added a stop in Poland to his trip this week to Europe for urgent talks with NATO and European allies, as Russian forces concentrate their fire upon cities and trapped civilians in a nearly month-old invasion of Ukraine.
Biden will first travel to Brussels and then to Poland to meet with leaders there, press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement on Sunday night.
Poland is a crucial ally in the Ukraine crisis. It is hosting thousands of American troops and is taking in more people fleeing the war in Ukraine – more than two million – than any other nation in the midst of the largest European refugee crisis in decades.
Biden will head to Warsaw for a bilateral meeting with President Andrzej Duda scheduled for Saturday. Biden will discuss how the US, along with its allies and partners, is responding to “the humanitarian and human rights crisis that Russia’s unjustified and unprovoked war on Ukraine has created,” Psaki said.
Ahead of his trip, Biden discussed the war with European leaders. President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom were expected to take part, the White House said on Sunday.
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA (AP) – Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited Cambodia for talks with the country’s longtime leader, Hun Sen, on Sunday to deepen relations and promote calls for the rule of law in one of the Southeast Asia’s closest partners of both China and Japan.
Kishida and Hun Sen in a joint statement condemned Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and called for “an immediate stop of the use of force and the withdrawal of the military forces from the territory of Ukraine”. They stressed “neither threat nor use of all kind of weapons of mass destruction can ever be accepted in any occasion”.
After China, Japan is Cambodia’s largest donor and has funded the construction of bridges, roads, ports, electricity and water supply.
Speaking to Japanese reporters, Kishida said that it was meaningful that he was able to share determination with both Indian and Cambodian leaders during his trips to both countries this weekend not to allow any attempts to change the status quo by force “in any region” even though Russia was not directly criticised in their joint statements.
“Realistically, it is impossible to expect all countries to agree on everything. It was a major achievement that we confirmed our basic stance that we do not tolerate any unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force,” he said.
In the joint statement, Kishida also expressed his intention to support “the promotion of democracy and the rule of law such as holding elections in a way that reflects diverse voices from Cambodian people”.
Just last week, a court in Cambodia convicted 21 people of treason and related charges for their nonviolent opposition activities. They included seven exiled leaders of the disbanded Cambodia National Rescue Party – the main opposition party – each of whom received 10-year prison terms.
Kishida’s visit came three days after the departure of two Japanese naval ships from Ream Naval Base, where the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force conducted demining training with
Cambodian counterparts.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen with his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida at Peace Palace, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. PHOTO: AP
