LONDON (AFP) – Royal Dutch Shell said yesterday that it will win a boost from soaring gas prices in the fourth quarter despite supply problems, but cautioned that Omicron weighs on oil demand.
Shell expects “significantly higher” gas revenues in the three months to December thanks to the “high liquid natural gas spot price environment” as it overcomes “ongoing supply issues”.
Oil product sales, however, will be hit by “seasonal trends, the demand impact due to the Omicron virus and foreign exchange impacts in Turkey following a plunge in the Turkish lira.
The energy major’s trading update was published ahead of its fourth-quarter results on February 3.
Shell, like its rivals, slumped into a huge loss in 2020 as the long-running coronavirus pandemic slashed energy demand and crude prices.
However, European gas prices have blazed a record-breaking trail over the past year on strong winter demand and simmering geopolitical tensions between key supplier Russia and consumer nations.
Runaway spot gas prices, alongside other buoyant commodities including crude oil, have fuelled mounting concern about spiking inflation worldwide.
Meanwhile, Shell is distributing USD7 billion to shareholders from the sale agreed last year of its assets in the shale-oil rich Permian Basin of the United States to rival ConocoPhillips.
The group added yesterday that it would distribute the remaining USD5.5 billion of the proceeds in the form of share buybacks.
The news comes after Shell shareholders voted overwhelmingly last month to switch the group’s headquarters from the Netherlands to Britain after a century and drop Royal Dutch from the name.
Europe’s biggest energy firm says the move will simplify its tax and share arrangements, and speed up its transition from fossil fuels that cause climate change.
PHNOM PENH (XINHUA) – Cambodia reported 3,504 cases of malaria in 2021, a 57 per cent drop from 8,222 in 2020, a health official said yesterday.
“Among the reported cases, there have been no any deaths,” director of the National Centre for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control Huy Rekol told Xinhua.
He said Cambodia has not had any malaria deaths since 2018, which led to the country being considered a successful country in eliminating malaria deaths three years earlier than its target.
Rekol attributed the decline in malaria cases to people’s better awareness, adequate equipment such as malaria testing devices, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, and anti-malarial drugs.
Malaria diagnostic tests and treatment are very effective in Cambodia, he said, adding that Artesunate-Mefloquine, or ASMQ, is 100 per cent safe and efficacious against malaria.
“We hope that Cambodia will be able to eliminate malaria cases by 2025, as year after year, the number of malaria cases has dropped remarkably,” he said.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease, which is often found in rainy seasons and mostly appears in forest and mountainous provinces.
Rekol said to avoid being bitten by malaria-carrying mosquitoes, people living in malaria risk areas should sleep under insecticide-treated mosquito nets all the time.
THE WASHINGTON POST – Gustav Klimt’s 1900 painting Philosophy might have been remembered as a pivotal artwork. Made at a turning point in the artist’s career, it was vividly coloured, dramatically composed – even provocative in its unflinching emotion. But in 1945, the work was destroyed in a fire and essentially lost to history.
For decades, only black-and-white photographs of Philosophy existed. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, we can see the work in full colour. But does the re-creation really look like the original? Does it even look like a Klimt?
The new version, created by Google Arts and Culture using machine learning, shows a very different Klimt than you’d expect if you’re familiar with The Kiss or Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. On the left side of the canvas, interwoven bodies create a fleshy, blue-hued form that looks almost bruised. On the right, an expressionless, algae-coloured sphinx dominates a lurid green sky.
A glance at the colours in the reconstructed work, and you might mistake Klimt for his Fauvist contemporaries or think he was hanging around with the painter Marc Chagall.
Philosophy is one of three massive “faculty paintings” that the Austrian painter (1862-1918) created for the University of Vienna’s assembly hall ceiling and that were lost in a fire at the end of World War II.
At the Rijksmuseum, panels that were reconstructed with data from artificial intelligence were added to The Night Watch. PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON POST
Earlier this year, Franz Smola, a curator at Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, which has the largest Klimt collection in the world, guided the paintings’ “recolouring” for the Google Arts and Culture ‘Klimt vs Klimt’ exhibition online.
“I don’t know any better than Google what those paintings really look like, but I don’t think that they looked like that,” said longtime director Jane Kallir of the Galerie St Etienne in New York, which gave Klimt his first shows in the United States.
“These things look like cartoons. They don’t look like Klimt paintings.
“It’s like people who try to clone their dogs. You can do it, but it’s not the same dog.”
The faculty paintings are one of several recent attempts to use artificial intelligence to re-create lost art.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam used AI to reconstruct missing panels from the edges of Rembrandt’s famous Night Watch and, over the summer, temporarily installed them alongside the real thing.
A pair of researchers in the United Kingdom (UK), who call themselves Oxia Palus, say they’ve rebuilt a Picasso that was hidden beneath The Blind Man’s Meal, using 3-D printing and AI. In October, an orchestra in Bonn, Germany, ‘played’ Beethoven’s 10th and unfinished symphony in full. The version was written by an algorithm.
George Cann, co-founder of Oxia Palus, posits that artificial intelligence “could give us this parallel alternative universe of art that we never really quite had”.
It’s an alluring idea. Peek beneath a Picasso at an earlier painting under the surface layer and it’s like you’re peering into the artist’s mind, eavesdropping on thoughts from
a century ago. See a painting that was lost to catastrophe come back to life and it’s like you’ve traveled back in time, reversed fate.
But if any of this re-created universe of lost art, like Philosophy, is inaccurate, the AI creators might not be resurrecting history but inadvertently rewriting it.
Klimt’s faculty paintings make a particularly compelling case for the kind of rediscovery promised by AI. In 1894, Austria’s Ministry of Education commissioned Klimt to paint allegories representing the disciplines of Medicine, Philosophy and Jurisprudence, expecting he’d use the same traditional mural style that he was known for around Vienna.
That’s not what they received. Klimt painted chaotic, dark images of suffering. A sick-looking, motley crew appears in Medicine and Jurisprudence which shows a gaunt man beneath three glamorous, gold-clad judges, seems to depict not the law’s strengths but its elitism.
The works were lambasted by academics who suspected Klimt was mocking their disciplines and by conservative politicians who believed the depictions would incite immoral behaviour.
Klimt bought back the paintings from the state and never again did a public commission.
It was a watershed moment in the artist’s career. With the faculty paintings, Smola said, Klimt “started for the first time to do his own thing, to go his own way”, adding that, had they survived, they would be displayed in museums as landmarks of European Symbolist art.
That was part of the impetus to recolour the works with AI. Emil Wallner, a researcher at Google, built the algorithm. He used 100,000 art historical references and programmed it to have a bias toward Klimt’s style.
For his part, Smola combed through articles and texts where writers responded to the faculty paintings, seeking an objective sense of colour in the subjective writing of criticism.
Throughout the process, Smola had to make bold choices, such as instructing the AI to colour Jurisprudence’s background red, a decision made after discovering that one of Klimt’s biggest critics noted that Jurisprudence featured the colours of the German flag.
Wallner said that in the recoloured paintings, he saw a new, rebellious side of Klimt. “When you see his most famous works like The Kiss and the gold [period] artworks, it can be easy to forget his spirit and who he was as a person,” he said.
But for Kallir, there is little of Klimt in what she calls the “gaudy” re-creations, adding that the paintings would have been more subdued, with smoother transitions from one colour to the next.
“If you’ve got a decent eye, and you look at the black-and-white reproductions and compare them to other paintings that were done around the same time, you can probably get a better idea of what they really look like,” she said.
Each application of AI to art has different levels of rigour. To reconstruct Rembrandt’s Night Watch Rob Erdmann, senior scientist at the Rijksmuseum, collected 55 terabytes of data, collaborated with the museum’s art historians, and used a copy of the original painting as a reference. All to give visitors, he said, “the sense – if they squinted – of what the Night Watch might have looked like if it had not been cut down.”
But terms like “digital restoration” can confer a misleading legitimacy. To make a 3-D re-creation of the Picasso underpainting, Oxia Palus used an X-ray available online and guided its algorithm with paintings from the artist’s broad ‘Blue Period’. They didn’t talk to art historians about the original work, but told CNN that “the treasure (Picasso has) hidden for future generations is finally being revealed.”
Kenneth Brummel, who co-curated the new exhibition ‘Picasso: Painting the Blue Period’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, has reservations about Oxia Palus’s approach, noting that to re-create a canvas’s surface, they would need information accessible only to the museum that owns the work. “My concern about the methods used here is not just that there is incomplete data,” Brummel said, “but also that the algorithms that are used are based on a group of individuals’ arbitrary and highly subjective selection of works of art that they deem to be related.”
Brummel’s exhibition explores technical methods used to learn more about Picasso’s underpainting, including advanced microscopy and spectroscopic imaging.
He said he prefers to present the raw scientific data because it allows visitors to draw their own conclusions. “Part of the beauty of providing a narrative that is incomplete is that you’re inviting others to participate.”
From one perspective, mechanically reproducing lost art does the opposite: It offers a clean answer where there are none, and relies on the predictable when the beauty is, often, in the unexpected.
“Whether it’s an artist or a composer or whatever, there is such a thing as genius,” Kallir said. “The reason that we are awestruck by a Beethoven symphony or a Klimt painting is because they had something that’s inimitable.”
LONDON (AP) – Manchester United appointed a new chief executive on Thursday in the latest step by the fallen English Premier League giant to regain its elite playing status and restore stability.
Richard Arnold has been promoted from group managing director to CEO, the top leadership role below members of the owning Glazer family.
Arnold assumes the responsibilities of Ed Woodward, who leaves on February 1 having initially announced his departure last April amid the furore over United’s attempt to join the short-lived, ill-fated European Super League with five other English clubs.
“We are now looking forward to Richard and his leadership team opening a new phase in the club’s evolution,” co-chairman Joel Glazer said in a statement, “with ambitious plans for investment in Old Trafford, the strengthening of our engagement with fans, and continued drive towards our most important objective – winning on the pitch.”
Woodward had served as executive vice chairman since 2013 – the year United’s decline began with the retirement of Alex Ferguson as manager after 26 years and the Premier League trophy being won for a 13th and final time by the Scot.
The record 20-time English champions haven’t won the league since then. The club, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, hasn’t won any trophy since Jose Mourinho delivered the Europa League title in 2017.
His successor, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, was fired in December and Ralf Rangnick installed as interim manager until the end of the season.
The re-opening of schools for Year 10 and Year 11 students nationwide last Monday has brought about a mixed kind of reaction among the parties involved. A sense of relief among educators, feeling of excitement among students to see their friends again and for some parents, a concern over the safety of their children in class.
However, the Ministry of Edu-cation deserves recognition for the hard work and efforts in ensuring a flawless and smooth first day of school, even with conducting ART tests for the returning students. Hats off to everyone involved!
With a son who is in Year 10 and has started physical lessons last Monday and another in Year 8 who will start school on January 17, I have the assurance that the ministry is doing their best to ensure the safety and well-being of my children while at school. I was surprised to learn that students are still required to attend school five-days a week and there was no change in the number of students allocated for one class, although my son insisted that the classroom is spacious enough to allow physical distancing for all the 23 students in his class.
I would have expected some form of leeway in terms of physical attendance – maybe only three days a week to allow for online learning if they are not at school, since we are still in the early Endemic Phase.
With only Year 10 and 11 students present at school, there should be enough classrooms to accommodate classes that should have been split into groups. Even most departments and offices are employing this strategy to avoid overcowding in a confined space.
According to a report on Model-driven mitigation measures for reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PINAS), stu-dent cohorting, in which students are divided into two separate populations that attend in-person classes on alternating schedules, can reduce both the likelihood and the size of outbreaks.
Families, schools, and com-munities can work together to help ensure students can safely remain physically together in school.
This includes ensuring everyone who is eligible gets the COVID-19 vaccine. It means wearing a face mask, staying home when not feeling well and doing whatever is possible to keep others safe around us. When everyone does their part, the whole community wins.
LONDON (AP) – Consumer prices in the 19 countries that use the euro currency hit a record high of five per cent in December compared with a year earlier.
The rise was led by a surge in energy prices, according to numbers released yesterday by the European Union’s (EU) statistical office.
Inflation is now at the highest level in the eurozone since recordkeeping began in 1997 and broke a record set in November. Soaring prices are compounding problems for European Central Bank policymakers who have been keeping interest rates at ultra-low levels to stimulate the economy amid the global pandemic.
BEIJING (AP) – Since he was a child, Li Jingwei did not know his real name. He did not know where he was born, or for certain how old he was – until he found his biological family last month with the help of a long-remembered map.
Li was a victim of child trafficking. In 1989 when he was four, a bald neighbour lured him away by saying they would go look at cars, which were rare in rural villages.
That was the last time he saw his home, Li said. The neighbour took him behind a hill to a road where three bicycles and four other kidnappers were waiting. He cried, but they put him on a bike and rode away.
“I wanted to go home but they didn’t allow that,” Li said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Two hours later, I knew I wouldn’t be going back home and I must have met bad people.”
He remembers being taken on a train. Eventually he was sold to a family in another province, Henan.
ABOVE & BELOW: In this image taken from video, Li Jingwei is reunited with his mother in Lankao in central China’s Henan; and the map used to identify his home town. PHOTOS: AP
“Because I was too young, and I hadn’t gone to school yet, I couldn’t remember anything, including the names” of his parents and hometown, he said.
Etched in his memory, however, was the landscape of his village in the southwestern city of Zhaotong, Yunnan province. He remembered the mountains, bamboo forest, a pond next his home – all the places he used to play.
After his abduction, Li said he drew maps of his village every day until he was 13 so he wouldn’t forget.
Before he reached school age, he would draw them on the ground, and after entering school he drew them in notebooks. It became an obsession, he said.
More than 30 years after his abduction, a meticulous drawing of his village landscape helped police locate it and track down his biological mother and siblings.
He was inspired to look for his biological family after two reunions made headlines last year. In July, a Chinese father, Guo Gangtang, was united with his son after searching for 24 years, and in December, Sun Haiyang was reunited with his kidnapped son after 14 years.
Reports of child abductions occur regularly in China, though how often they happen is unclear. The problem is aggravated by restrictions that until 2015 allowed most urban couples only one child.
Li decided to speak with his adoptive parents for clues and consulted DNA databases, but nothing turned up. Then he found volunteers who suggested he post a video of himself on Douyin, a social media platform, along with the map he drew from memory.
It took him only 10 minutes to redraw what he had drawn hundreds, perhaps thousands of times as a child, he said. That post received tens of thousands of views. By then, Li said police had already narrowed down locations based on his DNA sample, and his hand-drawn map helped villagers identify a family.
Li finally connected with his mother over the telephone. She asked about a scar on his chin which she said was caused by a fall from a ladder. “When she mentioned the scar, I knew it was her,” Li said.
Other details and recollections fell into place, and a DNA test confirmed his heritage. In an emotional reunion on New Year’s Day, he saw his mother for the first time since he
was four.
As Li walked toward her, he collapsed on the ground in emotion. Lifted up by his younger brother and sister, he finally hugged his mother.
Li choked up when speaking about his father, who has passed away. Now the father of two teenage children, Li said he will take his family to visit his father’s grave with all his aunts and uncles during Lunar New Year celebrations next month.
“It’s going to be a real big reunion,” he said. “I want to tell him that his son is back.”
The Embassy of the United State (US) of America in Brunei Darussalam is partnering with Big BWN Project and Malaysia-based Biji-biji Initiative to launch the Brunei Young Southeast Asian Leadership Initiative (YSEALI) Summit 2022, which will run from March to September.
Applications close on January 31.
The summit will focus on climate change issues in Southeast Asia, and will empower over 80 youth to become regional climate leaders equipped with the tools to tackle a warming planet.
The summit offers a hands-on, immersive learning experience that will expand the participants’ ability to navigate the complexity of climate issues.
“We are seeking resilient YSEALI alumni who are committed to championing innovative climate solutions and who can drive a united effort for climate mitigation in Southeast Asia,” said Chargé d’Affaires at Embassy of the US of America in Brunei Darussalam Emily Fleckner.
Eligible participants from 11 YSEALI member countries (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam) may apply for the programme, which includes pre-summit virtual activities (March – May 2022), the summit (June 2022), and post-summit follow-up activities (July – September 2022).
Participants will have the opportunity to apply for one of two optional and highly rewarding programme tracks. The Small Grants track will supply each of five winning teams USD2,000 to implement their green recovery initiative. The Career Fellowship track will invite 12 participants to join climate action organisations in the region working on innovative climate change solutions.
Regional climate change experts will join the summit, offering participants beneficial knowledge and experience as well as a chance to network with like-minded professionals.
PARIS (AFP) – European Union (EU) Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen said yesterday that negotiations to resolve tensions between Russia and Ukraine must involve Europe.
Speaking ahead of crunch security talks between the United States (US) and Russia next week, von der Leyen told a press conference in Paris: “One thing is clear: no solution without Europe. Whatever the solution, Europe has to be involved.”
She added that the European Union was “very present” in Ukraine, with financial aid totalling EUR6 billion, as well as highly dependent on its position as a transit hub for gas imports from Russia.
French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking alongside von der Leyen, stressed that US-Russia talks were a positive development, but said they would not affect “European security architecture” which was “up to us to build”.
“It’s a good thing that there are discussions between the US and Russia,” he said.
“The coordination between the Europeans and Americans is exemplary on the matter,” he added, while also calling for the EU to hold its own talks with Moscow.
“Dialogue does not mean making concessions,” he said.
With tens of thousands of Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, the administration of US President Joe Biden has accepted talks in Geneva next Monday with Moscow which has proposed agreements to limit NATO’s expansion.
XINHUA/ VOGUE – Maria Grazia Chuiri’s Christian Dior haute couture collection represented her emotional response to standing up for the interdependence between couture and all the people who work to craft its materials. Coming back to in-person shows after three seasons made her want to reconnect with “being present”, through the awareness of the tactility of amazing hand-made textiles.
The big question of what fashion will look like in the world we are re-emerging into was answered by Chuiri in a primary focus on daywear. The top-to-toe silhouettes of grey tweeds or camel cashmere might have suggested the lasting echo of the long walks in nature that entire populations have been taking during the pandemic. Seen against the conceptual landscape murals, designed by Eva Jospin, the models, in flat hiking boots or woven mesh slippers were a contrast to the delicacy of the nymph-like flou dresses in the collection.
The dresses seemed to hark back to that personal Italianate aspect of Chiuri’s romanticism. Semi-transparent, pleated, and delicately crimped, some had been entirely hand-braided from strands of silk; the corsetry “woven like baskets”.
The poetry Chiuri sees in this is connected not just to the visual effect. “It’s a metaphorical thing, to say that we’re all connected,” she said.
