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TODAY IN NORWAY

Today in Norway: A roundup of the latest news on Wednesday 

Find out what’s going on in Norway on Wednesday with The Local’s short roundup of important news. 

Pictured are the Lyngen Alps.
Read about suspected Omicron cases in Norway, Oslo raising it's preparedness and more in today's roundup. Pictured are the Lyngen Alps. Photo by Anton Lammert on Unsplash

4,045 new Covid cases registered in Norway

On Tuesday, 4,045 coronavirus cases were detected. This is 2,552 more registered infections than last Tuesday. Over the past week, an average of 3,003 infections have been reported per day. The same average a week ago was 1,997 cases. 

READ ALSO: Norway’s new national Covid-19 measures

In Oslo, 762 infections have been recorded. This is 167 more than the same day last week, but 76 fewer than the day before. 

A graph showing the total number of Covid-19 cases in Norway.
Total number of Covid-19 cases in Norway. Source: Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

Suspected Omicron cases in Norway

There have been three suspected Omicron cases in Ullensaker. However, they have yet to be confirmed by sequencing. 

“The most important thing now is that those who are infected and their close contacts follow the rules of isolation and quarantine. We expect to have the first results of the tests ready by the end of tomorrow. We report back to the municipal doctor when the results are available,” Line Vold, department director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, said in a statement.

The three tested positive at Gardermoen airport after travelling from Southern African via stopovers. The travellers who returned the positive tests are currently in quarantine hotels. 

Oslo moves to the highest level of preparedness

Oslo municipality has raised its level of preparedness to the highest level, level three. 

“This means that we again set central crisis management to ensure effective information sharing and coordination of response,” Oslo’s executive mayor, Raymond Johansen, explained at a press conference. 

Johansen also added that the municipality was mulling over enforcing the use of facemasks, which is currently only recommended in Norway’s capital. 

He also added that he would do everything he could to avoid lockdowns and the shutdown of hospitality. 

Vaccine certificate available for use today

From this afternoon, a new version of the Covid-19 certificate should become available, and municipalities going through a spike of infection will be able to use it, Norway’s health minister Ingvild Kjerkol announced. 

The return of the domestic certificate, which was previously scrapped when all measures were lifted at the end of September, comes weeks after it was first announced. 

The reasons for the delays were to pass regulations allowing local authorities to implement the measures and to get all the technical details into place. 

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TODAY IN NORWAY

Today in Norway: A roundup of the latest news on Monday

Earthquake near Bergen, perpetrators of Oslo shooting still at large, retail industry strike looms, and other news from Norway on Monday.

Today in Norway: A roundup of the latest news on Monday

Mini-earthquake rattles Voss, outside Bergen 

An earthquake with a magnitude of 3.3 on the Richter scale rattled the municipality of Voss early on Monday morning, waking up many residents but appearing to do no actual damage. 

“We first received a message at 4.22am from a man in Vaksdal who had felt the earthquake. He described it as a clear shaking in the house and as a kind of rumbling,” Berit Marie Storheim, senior engineer at the Department of Geosciences at Bergen University, told the NTB newswire, adding that “3.3 is a small earthquake in the global context and it is not unusual in Norway.” 

She said that she and her colleagues did not expect any damage to buildings or other infrastructure but called on anyone who had felt the quake to register it at skelv.no. 

Norwegian vocabulary: jordskjelv – earthquake  

Perpetrators of shooting at Oslo’s Beirut Kebab still at large 

Oslo police said on Sunday that they were still looking for the men who shot and injured a man in his twenties at the Beirut Kebab kebab restaurant in the Grønland district of Oslo on Saturday night.

“We are investigating broadly, looking at several milieu, and we know that there is more than one perpetrator,” Maria Huseby Fossen, a police lawyer, told public broadcaster NRK.

The victim of the shooting has yet to be interviewed as he is till being treated for his injuries, but police have already interviewed several other witnesses and are seeking to obtain footage from security cameras.

Norwegian vocabulary: ingen pågrepet – no one arrested

Dury free shops may close if retail sector employees strike  

Thousands of members of the Handel og Kontor (HK), Parat and Negotia unions may go on strike from Tuesday if mediation launched on Sunday morning with the Federation of Norwegian Enterprise (Virke), one of Norway’s leading employer groups, is not successful.

The union’s deadline for progress in the talks is midnight on Tuesday night, after which they may mount strikes at building materials stores, grocery stores and duty-free shops, as well as shops run by Norgesgruppen and Coop.

Handel og Kontor has claimed that the strike could see duty free shops at Norwegian airports forced to closed, something the shops’ owners, the Travel Retail Norway joint venture, has denied. 

Norwegian vocabulary: mekling – mediation

Norway calls on West to support Arab peace plan in Gaza 

Norway’s foreign minister Espen Barth Eide on Sunday evening called for EU countries and the US to support a Gaza peace plan drawn up by Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, as representatives from Arab and Western countries meet in Riyadh on the sidelines of the regional meeting of the World Economic Forum. 

“The closest we have to a comprehensive peace plan is the one Arab countries are currently working on. It is important that we support this. It is simply better to have one plan than no plan,” Eide told Norway’s NTB newsire. “Recognition of a Palestinian state is not an end in itself, but a tool we can use once. When a country like Norway uses it, we must know that it can have an effect.” 

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell, British foreign minister David Cameron, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry, Jordanian foreign minister Umin Safadi and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas are in in Riyadh for the meeting, along with Eide. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Riyadh, but will not attend the meeting. 

Eide said that the idea that countries such as the US or Norway could somehow lead peace efforts in Israel and Palestine was past. 

“A country from the West cannot travel down and ‘make peace’, as we maybe let ourselves believe. It needs to be anchored in the region,” he told NRK. 

Norwegian vocabulary: forankrast – anchored

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