DALLAS (AP) – Stephen Curry knows he didn’t exactly honour the legacy of the NBA’s best seven-foot three-point shooter on the night the Dallas Mavericks retired Dirk Nowitzki’s number against the Golden State Warriors.
The league’s most prolific player from deep isn’t concerned about the mini-slump he couldn’t shake.
Luka Doncic scored 26 points and the Mavericks celebrated the retirement of Nowitzki’s number 41 by beating the cold-shooting Curry and the Warriors 99-82 yesterday.
“The body of work over the course of this year’s been pretty solid,” said Curry, who scored 14 points and made just five of 24 shots coming off his worst shooting night of the season.
“This stretch has not been great not up to my standards. So you’ve just to stick to the programme. It’ll come around.”
The Mavericks knew the night belonged to their franchise icon, and that Nowitzki’s number 41 wasn’t going to the rafters until after they played the team with the NBA’s best record coming in.
Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Doncic shoots against Golden State Warriors forward Nemanja Bjelica during the game. PHOTO: AP
Dallas responded with its first four-game winning streak of the season in Doncic’s third game back since a career-long, 10-game absence caused by left ankle and knee issues and a positive COVID-19 test.
Playing without European sidekick Kristaps Porzingis, who went into the health and safety protocols just as Doncic came out, Dallas’ 22-year-old sensation played aggressively and was 10 of 12 on free throws with eight assists and seven rebounds.
The only concern for the Mavericks was Doncic limping off the floor in the final two minutes and not returning. He said his tweaked right ankle wasn’t a concern.
“There are so many things going through your head,” said Jason Kidd, the point guard when Nowitzki led the Mavericks to their only championship in 2011 and now the Dallas coach who wore a green Nowitzki jersey to his meeting with reporters before and after the game.
“You know the Warriors are going to score. Steph is going to make 3s. We just tried to make it as tough as possible and on offence take care of the ball. And our defence did a great job in giving us a chance to win.”
Curry was one of nine from three-point range and is eight of 41 overall the past two games.
After missing all five attempts from deep before halftime, Curry connected nine seconds into the second half but couldn’t keep it going as Golden State missed a chance to be the first team to 30 victories and had a season low in points.
“Everyone’s throwing everything at him,” coach Steve Kerr said.
“Their best defender. Their double teams. They’re trying to make it as difficult as possible. I thought tonight he pressed a little bit. He’s trying hard to get out of it.”
Andrew Wiggins scored 17 points for Golden State. At 29-8, the Warriors dropped into a tie with the Phoenix Suns for the best record in the NBA.
Dorian Finney-Smith scored 15 of his 17 points in the second half and had nine rebounds and two blocks – one when he stripped Draymond Green on a dunk attempt and the other when Curry drove for a layup.
The Warriors were down nine but getting stops late in the fourth quarter when Curry missed badly from three, and Jalen Brunson scored the next four points to put Dallas up 13. Brunson finished with 15 points. The Warriors shot a season-worst 18 per cent from three (five of 28).
“Dallas played great defence tonight,” Kerr said. “They were the more physical team. I thought they just took it to us right from the beginning of the game. We just couldn’t find a rhythm.”
REDU, BELGIUM (THE WASHINGTON POST) – Nearly 40 years ago, books saved this village.
The community was shrinking fast. Farming jobs had disappeared and families were moving away from this pastoral patch of French-speaking Belgium.
But in the mid-1980s, a band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. The village of about 400 became home to more than two dozen bookstores – more shops than cows, its boosters liked to say – and thousands of tourists thronged the winsome streets.
Now, though, more than half the bookstores have closed. Some of the storekeepers died, others left when they could no longer make a living. Many who remain are in their 70s and aren’t sure what’ll happen after they’re gone.
It’s not just the businesses at risk. It’s Redu’s identity.
This is a place that celebrates itself as a village du livre, a book town. Its public lampposts and trash cans are adorned with bibliophilic hieroglyphs.
But what happens when the main attractions become less attractive? This is the challenge the village du livre must now confront.
“Life is changing, but nothing is dying,” said Mayor Anne Laffut of Libin, the municipality where Redu sits. “Everything is evolving.”
ABOVE & BELOW: La Librairie Ardennaise, one of the oldest bookstores in Redu, Belgium, has about 30,000 volumes; and Miep van Duin, owner of De Eglantier and Crazy Castle, plans to run it until she’s no longer able. PHOTOS: THE WASHINGTON POST
Redu holds a vaunted place in the history of book towns, an honorific that originated with an eccentric Brit who brought hundreds of thousands of books to the Welsh market town Hay-on-Wye in the 1960s.
Richard Booth, who died in 2019, transformed Hay into a global capital of used books, attracting numerous booksellers and opening a half-dozen shops of his own.
Booth’s success inspired struggling rural communities around the world to remake themselves as book towns, hoping to attract tourists and jump-start their economies. Redu was the first copycat.
Spurred by a visit to Hay in the late 1970s, part-time Redu resident Noel Anselot hatched a similar strategy for his weekend home, according to a brief history of the place by Miep van Duin, who at 76 is one of the village’s longest tenured booksellers.
On Easter weekend in 1984, roughly 15,000 people descended on Redu, perusing the used and antiquarian volumes vendors sold out of abandoned stables and sidewalk stalls. The booksellers decided to stay. Others soon followed, along with an illustrator, a bookbinder and a paper maker. It was an eclectic, countercultural crowd. Young families arrived, too, and new students trickled into the faded schoolhouse.
The pièce de résistance: For the first time in years, Redu had its own bakery.
The village, van Duin concluded, had been reborn.
“It was much more lively then than it is now,” she said.
Now there are 12 or fewer bookshops, depending on how one counts – and, perhaps, who is doing the counting. Those who are more optimistic about the future of the bookstores tend to cite a higher number.
Those who are less hopeful say their trade has fallen out of fashion, and that people, especially young people, are reading fewer books.
“The clientele is ageing and is even disappearing,” said owner of La Librairie Ardennaise Paul Brandeleer.
Brandeleer was among the pioneers of Easter ‘84. His inventory includes tomes that are hundreds of years old.
Now, at 73, he’s living off his retirement pension. A sign in front of his store used to advertise his services as achat – vente, buying and selling, but the former has been crossed out. He doesn’t want any more books.
“I have 30,000 books, but when we disappear, they will go to the trash,” Brandeleer said.
“We have no kids to take over, they are not interested.”
Surveying his shop’s rows of books, its low ceiling and brick walls, he offered a metaphor pulled from the stacks: “I think we are the last of the Mohicans.”
Down the road, the owner of Bouquinerie Générale – a store that specialises in bandes dessinées, French-language comics also known as BDs – had his own genre-appropriate comparison.
“We are like Asterix: The last village fighting everyone,” said Bob Gossens, invoking the French comic book series about a small Gallic village that resists the Roman Empire.
In his telling, the Romans might be global tech companies or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, pulling his clientele away one app at a time.
“The Internet is breaking everything,” the 73-year-old said.
Nowadays, Gossens gets few customers aside from a core group of regulars who come for his rare editions. Those who do stop in, he has noticed, tend to treat the place like an exhibit of artefacts from another age, rather than a still-functioning store.
“They come here like they go to the museum,” he said.
Gossens does not predict a storybook ending for the shops in his village: “We will die a natural death,” he said.
A founding member of the International Organization of Book Towns, Redu is part of a network of similarly situated communes. Van Duin, who was the group’s first board president, said the still-thriving book towns are in Britain, including Scotland’s Wigtown, which hosts a renowned literary festival.
“When you go to a book town in the United Kingdom (UK) in November, sometimes you have to wait before you can pay,” van Duin said. “And here, when somebody comes in in November and buys a book, I could kiss him.”
While a return to the glory days is probably out of reach, van Duin is hopeful that Redu will retain its artistic vibe, even if the bookstores continue to become less plentiful.
“It will stay a special village, because that’s the reputation and that doesn’t die very quick,” she said.
This is a natural process in a village life cycle, said Maarten Loopmans, a geography professor at Belgium’s KU Leuven. If a community like Redu is to survive, eventually a new generation must take over and strike a balance between “livability for themselves and, at the same time, an asset to sell to the outer world,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure it will still be attractive to tourists,” Loopmans added. “But it will need to reinvent itself with a new story that is more attractive these days.”
When Johan Deflander and Anthe Vrijlandt moved to Redu about six years ago, the couple’s friends warned them they were making a mistake.
“Everyone said, ‘Oh you’re going to buy a house in Redu? Isn’t that the village that’s going to die? Where they used to have bookshops?’ “ Deflander said.
The couple, who are in their early 50s and live part of the year in Kenya, wanted to open a new kind of establishment, one that moves beyond the “stuffy, old, bankrupt secondhand bookshop idea,” Vrijlandt said.
“It’s all in the narrative, you know?” Deflander said. “Some of the people who have been here for a longer term, they have difficulties changing the narrative. While we -“
“While we have the luxury of not being stuck in the past,” Vrijlandt finished.
Their shop, La Reduiste, hosts jazz nights and film screenings, in addition to selling books in multiple languages and serving espresso and Belgian beer. Books – or, perhaps just as important, the idea of books as symbols of comfort or quaint sophistication – remain at the centre of the business, which is a model the two say could be replicated villagewide. La Reduiste, they said, is profitable.
“The future is looking in the linkages between books and art in general,” Deflander said, as he and Vrijlandt took turns running the bar and greeting customers. “You can do a lot of interesting cultural activities if you open it up from just selling books.”
One of Redu’s most immediate concerns revolves around the schoolhouse, a stately but abandoned stone building at the centre of town. Laffut, the mayor, called a meeting to discuss possible future uses of the building and some 70 people showed up – nearly a quarter of the village’s population. The enthusiasm was uplifting, she said.
“There is a change of mentalities,” Laffut said. “The elders think the village is changing because there are fewer bookstores and it is a disappointment. But there is a new generation, which is very active in Redu. Many volunteers are teaming up with the same desire for the village to continue to endure.”
Laffut, who has been the municipality’s mayor for 15 years, said she is no longer worried about Redu’s future. The village’s location in the Belgian Ardennes, a vast region of forests and rolling hills, means it should continue to bring in nature lovers, she said, and its handful of restaurants and proximity to the Euro Space Center also help.
But perhaps the most significant recent development was the arrival of Mudia, an interactive art museum that opened in 2018 in a former vicar’s house, which displays works by Picasso, Rodin and Magritte. The museum has bolstered Redu’s reputation as a viable destination for sculptors and painters, and it is the most prominent example of the book town’s transition to an arts town.
Roland Vanderheyden has a foot in both Redu’s past and future. He worked full time as a bookbinder for six decades until cutting back in recent years to become a painter. Now, in the four rooms where his workshop used to be, he operates a gallery with his wife, Annie Kwasny. They’re both 75 and convinced this is Redu’s path forward.
“We created this gallery to move the village toward the arts,” Kwasny said. “We are in the middle of a transition, really.”
Some, like van Duin, are content watching such changes unfold. Her shop, De Eglantier and Crazy Castle, is connected to her home, and she plans to run it until she’s no longer able.
Her bookstore – a renovated and well-appointed barn with an English-language section in the former hayloft – exemplifies Redu’s last great evolution, from a farming community in decline to a locus of letters.
“There’s a natural process of change,” she said. “It’s inevitable, I think.”
After a recent interview, van Duin flipped the sign on her shop’s front door back to open and took her seat behind the till, awaiting the village’s next chapter.
BANGKOK (AP) Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (AP; pic below) begins a visit to strife-torn Myanmar today that he hopes will invigorate efforts by Southeast Asian nations to start a peace process, but critics say will legitimise the rule of the military that seized power last year and its campaign of violence.
Hun Sen, whose country holds the rotating chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, plans to meet with Myanmar’s leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, in an effort to promote a five-point plan endorsed by the group last year and bring about a cease-fire.
“What I would like to bring to the talks is nothing besides the five points, consensus points that were agreed upon by all ASEAN member states,” he said late Wednesday.
They include a halt to violence, talks with the opposition on a peaceful resolution, and permission for a special ASEAN envoy to meet and mediate with all parties in the conflict.
ASEAN leaders, including Min Aung Hlaing, agreed on those points last April. He was barred in October from attending ASEAN meetings after the group’s envoy was prevented from meeting arrested opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other detainees.
Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn, the current special envoy, said Hun Sen’s two-day trip is warranted because the situation in Myanmar is deteriorating rapidly.
Myanmar’s military has said Hun Sen will not be allowed to meet Suu Kyi.
Critics and Myanmar’s opposition say Hun Sen’s visit will add legitimacy to a military that is an international pariah with a history of bloodshed, including a brutal campaign against the Rohingya minority.
It is considered unlikely that opposition groups, including those engaged in armed struggle, will readily accept ASEAN’s plan as long as the military remains in power.
“I expect that ultimately the progress or failure to progress will depend on domestic politics and domestic developments in Myanmar. And in fact, there is not much that ASEAN or the chairman of ASEAN can do,” said senior lecturer Astrid Noren-Nilsson at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University in Sweden.
Hun Sen’s trip “is very good news for Myanmar’s military government, of course, a visit by a head of government from the region is in itself a legitimisation of the junta government,” she said in an interview.
The army seized power last February, preventing Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party from beginning a second term in office. The party had won a landslide victory in national elections in November 2020.
The National Unity Government, an underground opposition group and parallel administration urged Hun Sen to stay away.
“Meeting Min Aung Hlaing, shaking blood-stained hands. It’s not going to be acceptable,” said Dr Sasa, a spokesman for the group who uses one name.
Indonesian President President Joko Widodo said Myanmar’s leader will continue to be excluded from ASEAN meetings unless some progress is made.
BUFFALO, NEW YORK (AP) – Employees of a Starbucks store in upstate New York who voted to unionise last month walked off the job on Wednesday, saying they lacked the staff and resources to work safely amid surging COVID-19 cases.
Six employees who had been scheduled to work formed a picket line outside the Buffalo store, leading Starbucks to close it for the day, the company said. Three other employees had remained inside.
“Pressure to go to work is being put on many of us, when some of us already have other health issues. The company has again shown that they continue to put profits above people,” Starbucks Workers United said in a statement.
All of the Buffalo-area stores have been operating as “grab-and-go” locations since Monday, Starbucks said. More than 15,000 people have tested positive in Erie County over the past week, the highest seven-day total to date.
Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges said the company has met and exceeded CDC and expert guidelines and offered vaccine and isolation pay.
“Over and above that, all leaders are empowered to make whatever changes make sense for their neighbourhood, which includes shortening store hours or moving to 100 per cent takeout only, which is the case in Buffalo,” he said.
The employees said they will return to work when they feel the store is fully staffed and safe, possibly next Monday. About a third of the staff is out because of illness or exposure, the union said.
Pro-union pins on a table during a watch party for Starbucks’ employees union election in Buffalo. PHOTO: AP
ROME (AP) – An Italian museum is lending a fragment of the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece, in what both sides hope will become a permanent return that might encourage others – the British Museum, in particular – to send their own pieces of the works back, too.
Sicily’s regional archaeological museum said on Wednesday it had signed an agreement with the Acropolis Museum in Athens for a once-renewable, four-year loan of the small white marble piece it has, in exchange for a loan of a statue and vase. But the ultimate aim, Sicily’s A Salinas Archaeological Museum said in a statement, is the “indefinite return” of the fragment to Athens.
About half the surviving 5th Century BC sculptures that decorated the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis are in the British Museum in London, which has long resisted Greek appeals for their return. But small fragments are also held in other European museums.
“The return to Athens of this important artefact of the Parthenon goes in the direction of building a Europe of culture that has its roots in our history and in our identity,” said Sicily’s councilor for cultural heritage and identity, Alberto Samonà.
The piece is the right foot of a draped figure of Artemis, the Greek deity of the hunt, originally located on the eastern side of a 160-metre sculpted frieze that ran around the temple. It came to Palermo by way of a 19th Century English consul in Sicily, Robert Fagan, though it remains unknown how he acquired it. After Fagan died, his widow sold the fragment to the University of Palermo’s Regio museum, which became the A Salinas regional museum, the statement said.
The statement quoted Greek authorities as praising the initiative in the hope that it encourages the British Museum to return its sculptures, which were taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in the early 19th Century.
The sculptures – 17 figures from the building’s pediments and part of the frieze – have been the subject of a long dispute between Britain and Greece, which has renewed its bid to bring the marbles home.
Britain maintains that Elgin acquired the sculptures legally when Greece was ruled by the Ottomans. The Greek government said they were stolen and wants them returned for display in the Acropolis Museum that opened in 2009.
Italy’s fragment has been loaned to Athens in the past, but for short periods of time. Sicily’s regional authorities have initiated talks with the Culture Ministry to make the loan permanent, putting it on the agenda of a ministry committee that handles such returns, the statement said.
Italy has been at the forefront of international efforts to recover antiquities that were looted from its territory and ended up in museums and private collections around the world. It has also been on the returning end of the restitution market when it finds antiquities or artworks that were illegally brought into the country.
In exchange for receiving the foot fragment, the Acropolis museum is loaning the Palermo museum a 5th Century BC, marble statue of Athena and a terracotta amphora in the linear, geometric style that dates from the mid-8th Century BC, according to the statement.
Anthony Abell College (AAC) in Seria held a virtual orientation programme for its new intake of Year 7 students yesterday.
Ninety-nine students were registered under the school’s new intake of Year 7 students for 2022. They were accompanied by their parents and guardians during the orientation programme held via Microsoft Teams.
The programme began with a welcoming remark by Principal Mas Diana binti Abdul Samat, and deputy principals Azah Nor Azah binti Haji Marmin and Elmisuhardi bin Haji Rohani, followed by a talk delivered by Parents and Teachers Association (PTA) Chairman Suhaini bin Haji Othman.
The talk highlighted activities and programmes by PTA for the year.
The event was followed by a question-and-answer session, and concluded with a Doa Selamat.
The orientation session will continue tomorrow, comprising several talks by the school’s deputy principals, senior teachers and staff – covering academic issues, school rules and regulations, and discipline, welfare as well as counselling.
The new school term will see 80 per cent of new students attending physical lessons in the classroom and 20 per cent via online learning alternately.
Online learning will start on January 10, while physical lessons will commence on January 17.
Returning students are also required to take an antigen rapid test (ART) on the first day of physical attendance in the main hall, with standard operating procedures announced from time to time.
Anthony Abell College teachers conduct the orientation programme. PHOTO: AAC
MILWAUKEE (AP) – Pascal Siakam scored 33 points, OG Anunoby and Gary Trent Jr had 22 apiece and the Toronto Raptors beat the short-handed Milwaukee Bucks 117-111 yesterday.
Fred VanVleet added 19 points for the Raptors. They improved to 18-17 and overcame Milwaukee’s hot-shooting first half and late rally.
The defending NBA champion Bucks were without coach Mike Budenholzer after he entered the NBA’s health and safety protocols.
Milwaukee played without NBA Finals MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo because of an illness unrelated to COVID-19. Grayson Allen, George Hill and Pat Connaughton also entered protocols on Wednesday.
Khris Middleton led the Bucks with 25 points. Jordan Nwora had 17 and Jrue Holiday and DeMarcus Cousins each had 15.
Toronto Raptors’ Pascal Siakam drives to the basket against Milwaukee Bucks’ Wesley Matthews. PHOTO: AP
The Bucks were coming off a 115-106 home loss to lowly Detroit.
Milwaukee connected on 61 per cent of its shots to take a 77-68 at the half, tying the most points it has scored in the first half this season. The 77 points marked the most Toronto has surrendered in any half this season. The previous high was 72 in both halves of a 144-99 loss at Cleveland on December 26.
“You learn that it is a long game and sometimes you aren’t always going to be at your best,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said.
“They did a good job of not really overreacting to that first half. We got into the locker room and I told them we were pretty fortunate that it was only a nine-point game. It was just a matter of can we flip it around and start doing some of the things we do defensively, and we did.”
The Toronto coaching staff and bench became very vocal in the second half in an effort to boost the team’s defensive intensity, Nurse said.
“Everybody was energised and tuned in. That was fun,” he said.
Toronto erased a 14-point deficit and tied it at 85 midway through the third. The Raptors built a 15-point lead in the fourth, but the Bucks pulled within four points twice in the final minute.
“I’m not devastated,” Bucks acting coach Darvin Ham said. “I thought our guys played hard.”
Middleton said he was disappointed that the team couldn’t get a win for Ham.
“Overall, the coaching staff did a great job preparing us for tonight, we just let ourselves down in the third quarter,” he said.
JOHANNESBURG (AFP) – Brighton midfielder Yves Bissouma has made peace with Mali coach Mohamed Magassouba and is set to be a driving force behind the bid to go far at the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon from Sunday.
He fell out of favour in 2018 and a shoulder injury prevented him being considered for the 2019 Cup of Nations in Egypt, where Mali made a disappointing last-16 exit.
While it would be stretching optimism to believe Mali can go all the way, they seem certain to secure a top-two finish in a section including one-time champions Tunisia, minnows Mauritania and debutants the Gambia.
Here, AFP Sport puts the spotlight on the four Group F contenders. The group winners and runners-up are assured of last-16 places while the best four third-placed teams from the six sections also qualify.
MALI
Mali have regularly punched above their weight, finishing second, third twice and fourth three times in 11 appearances at the African football showpiece.
While not among the favourites in Cameroon, a squad including Bissouma and Southampton forward Moussa Djenepo from the Premier League are certainly capable of reaching the quarter-finals.
In most of the six groups finishing first carries a huge advantage as the table toppers then face a third-placed team in the round of 16.
Group F is different. The winners will likely face title-holders Algeria or the Ivory Coast while the runners-up would have a theoretically easier task against the Group B runners-up, possibly Guinea.
TUNISIA
The Carthage Eagles hope a frustrating start to preparations is not a sign of things to come as the floodlights went out just minutes into a training session near Tunis and did not come back on.
Tunisia are an incredibly consistent team as they have now qualified for an unrivalled 15 consecutive Cup of Nations tournaments from 1994.
During that time the north Africans have been champions once, runners-up once, semi-finalists twice and quarter-finalists six times.
Having reached the semi-finals in Egypt three years ago, the expectations of supporters will be that a team captained by Saint-Etienne forward Wahbi Khazri will go at least as far in Cameroon.
MAURITANIA
After reaching the Cup of Nations finals for the first time in 2019 and then qualifying for back-to-back appearances, the fortunes of Mauritania nose-dived.
Expected to be competitive recently in a World Cup group including Tunisia, Equatorial Guinea and Zambia, they fared woefully, collecting just two points from a possible 18 and finishing last.
French coach Corentin Martins, who had been in charge since 2014, was fired and compatriot Gerard Buscher, elevated from his technical director role, did not last long after a poor Arab Cup showing.
Another Frenchman, Didier Gomes Da Rosa, has taken over and will do well to plot a victory over the Gambia and secure possible qualification as one of the best four third-placed finishers.
GAMBIA
Gambia, who began the 2021 Cup of Nations qualifying competition as the only west African country never to reach the finals, have finally made it with Belgian coach Tom Saintfiet getting much of the credit.
They needed a penalty shootout to oust minnows Djibouti in a preliminary tie, then topped a group including fellow qualifiers Gabon, surprise flops the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola.
“Tom brought discipline and structure to our game,” said captain Pa Modou Jagne, a veteran defender who plays in the Swiss lower leagues.
SINGAPORE (CNA) – Singapore must brace for a “much bigger” COVID-19 infection wave from Omicron compared to that from the Delta variant, Singapore Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said on Wednesday.
At its peak, the number of Omicron cases could be “a few times” more than the approximately 3,000 daily cases that the Delta variant was registering in October and November last year, Ong said at a COVID-19 multi-ministry task force press conference.
Putting a number to the possible manifold increase, Ministry of Health director of medical services Associate Professor Kenneth Mak said that the Omicron wave could reach 15,000 cases a day in a “worse-case scenario”.
At the highest during the Delta variant peak last year, the number of cases surpassed 5,000 cases.
Ong said that while Delta infections were doubling in six to eight days, Omicron infections may double in two to three days.
Office workers walk out for lunch break at Raffles Place financial business district in Singapore. PHOTO: AFP
However, the “silver lining” is that studies coming out of countries like South Africa, the United States and Canada is that infections from Omicron are less severe than that from the Delta variant, he said.
Ong noted a similar situation in Singapore. He said of the 2,252 Omicron cases in Singapore so far, three required oxygen supplementation, but were taken off the support within three days and are recovering. None of the cases required intensive care.
Over the past week, Singapore’s daily COVID-19 case numbers have been around 200 on average, with 16 cases currently in intensive care. These figures are significantly lower than the numbers at their peak a few months ago, “indicating that the recent wave of Delta infections has subsided”, the Singapore Ministry of Health (MOH) said in a separate statement.
However, Singapore has seen a rise in the total number of confirmed Omicron cases over the past week, even as the Delta wave subsides, MOH said.
Over the past week, Singapore detected 1,281 confirmed Omicron cases, comprising 1,048 imported cases and 233 local cases. This makes up around 18 per cent of local cases in the last week, MOH said.
”With higher transmissibility of the Omicron variant, we are likely to experience another wave of community infections soon.
MADRID (AFP) – A woman accused by her ex-husband of kidnapping their two boys to prevent them from being vaccinated against COVID-19 turned herself into the authorities on Wednesday, officials said.
The 46-year-old woman was wanted for “kidnapping minors” after her ex-husband, who lives near the southern city of Seville, filed a complaint with police in mid-December accusing her of taking the boys aged 14 and 12 without authorisation, a judicial source told AFP.
The man said he had not seen the boys since November 4 when he received a letter from his former wife saying she planned to remove them from their school just days after a court ruled he had the right to decide whether the children should be vaccinated.
The woman turned herself into the authorities on Wednesday morning in Seville with the two boys and a judge ordered her to be remanded in custody pending charges, the source said.
The two minors were handed over to their father on Wednesday afternoon, a spokesman for Spain´s Guardia Civil police force said.
