Headline

Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah Awarded Nobel Literature Prize

Published

4 years ago

October 7, 2021

U.K.-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose experience of crossing continents and cultures has fed his novels about the impact of migration on individuals and societies, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.”

Gurnah, who recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literatures at the University of Kent, got the call from the Swedish Academy in the kitchen of his home in southeast England — and initially thought it was a prank.

He said he was “surprised and humbled” by the award.

Gurnah said the themes of migration and displacement that he explored “are things that are with us every day” — even more now than when he came to Britain in the 1960s.

“People are dying, people are being hurt around the world. We must deal with these issues in the most kind way,” he said.

“It’s still sinking in that the Academy has chosen to highlight these themes which are present throughout my work, it’s important to address and speak about them.”

Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, Gurnah moved to Britain as a teenage refugee in 1968, fleeing a repressive regime that persecuted the Arab Muslim community to which he belonged.

He has said he “stumbled into” writing after arriving in England as a way of exploring both the loss and liberation of the emigrant experience.

Gurnah is the author of 10 novels, including “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way,” “Paradise” — shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 — “By the Sea,” “Desertion” and “Afterlives.” The settings range from East Africa under German colonialism to modern-day England. Many explore what he has called “one of the stories of our times”: the profound impact of migration both on uprooted people and the places they make their new homes.

Gurnah, whose native language is Swahili but who writes in English, is only the sixth Africa-born author to be awarded the Nobel for literature, which has been dominated by European and North American writers since it was founded in 1901.

Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Literature prize in 1986, welcomed the latest African Nobel laureate as proof that “the Arts — and literature in particular — are well and thriving, a sturdy flag waved above depressing actualities” in “a continent in permanent travail.”

“May the tribe increase!” Soyinka told the AP in an email.

Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for literature, called Gurnah “one of the world’s most prominent post-colonial writers.” He said it was significant that Gurnah’s roots are in Zanzibar, a polyglot place that “was cosmopolitan long before globalization.”

“His work gives us a vivid and very precise picture of another Africa not so well known for many readers, a coastal area in and around the Indian Ocean marked by slavery and shifting forms of repression under different regimes and colonial powers: Portuguese, Indian, Arab, German and the British,” Olsson said.

He said Gurnah’s characters “find themselves in the gulf between cultures … between the life left behind and the life to come, confronting racism and prejudice, but also compelling themselves to silence the truth or reinventing a biography to avoid conflict with reality.”

Luca Prono said on the British Council website that in Gurnah’s work, “identity is a matter of constant change.” The academic said Gurnah’s characters “unsettle the fixed identities of the people they encounter in the environments to where they migrate.”

News of the award was greeted with excitement in Zanzibar, where many remembered Gurnah and his family — though few had actually read his books.

Gurnah’s books are not required reading in schools there and “are hardly to be found,” said the local education minister, Simai Mohammed Said, whose wife is Gurnah’s niece. But, he added, “a son of Zanzibar has brought so much pride.”

“The reaction is fantastic. Many are happy but many don’t know him, though the young people are proud that he’s Zanzibari,” said Farid Himid, who described himself as a local historian whose father had been a teacher of the Quran to the young Gurnah. “I have not had the chance to read any of his books, but my family talked about it.”

Gurnah didn’t often visit Zanzibar, he said, but he has suddenly become the talk of young people in the semiautonomous island region.

“And many elder people are very, very happy. Also me, as a Zanzibari. It’s a new step to make people read books again, since the internet has taken over.”

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

Last year’s prize went to American poet Louise Glück. Glück was a popular choice after several years of controversy. In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners. The awarding of the 2019 prize to Austrian writer Peter Handke caused protests because of his strong support for the Serbs during the 1990s Balkan wars.

On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize in physiology or medicine to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to three scientists whose work found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.

Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan were named as laureates of the Nobel Prize for chemistry Wednesday for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides.

Still to come are prizes for outstanding work in the fields of peace, on Friday, and economics, on Monday.

(AP)

Headline

Nigerian Man Jailed In US For $1.3m COVID-19 Fraud

Published

23 hours ago

July 12, 2025

Editor

A Nigerian man living in the San Gabriel Valley, Abiola Femi Quadri, was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison for defrauding California and Nevada out of $1.3m in COVID-19 pandemic unemployment and disability insurance benefits.

Quadri, 43, was caught submitting more than 100 fraudulent applications using stolen identities and using the money to build a nightclub and mall in Nigeria.

He was sentenced by United States District Judge George H. Wu, who also ordered him to pay $1,356,229 in restitution and a $35,000 fine.

This was contained in a press statement issued by the Public Information Officer, United States Attorney’s Office, Central District of California, Ciaran McEvoy, on Thursday, July 10, 2025.

Headline

Palestinian-American Beaten To Death By Israeli Settlers In Occupied West Bank

Published

1 day ago

July 12, 2025

Editor

…another man shot dead

Israeli settlers killed a 20-year-old Palestinian-American man in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health and an eyewitness, as settler violence against Palestinians ramps up in the occupied territory.

The twenty-year-old Sayfollah Musallet “was martyred after being severely beaten all over his body by settlers in the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah,” the health ministry said in a statement on Friday.

The municipality of Sinjel said that Musallet died following a “barbaric attack” carried out by settlers as part of “daily assaults” on local residents. It alleged Israeli forces stormed the area at the same time as the settlers’ attack, obstructing the work of paramedics and volunteers.

A friend of the deceased man’s family told CNN he was with Musallet and took him to a hospital in Ramallah, adding the young man was an American citizen born in Tampa, Florida.

Israel’s military said it was “aware of reports regarding a Palestinian civilian killed and a number of injured Palestinians as a result of the confrontation, and they are being looked into by the ISA [Israeli Security Agency] and Israel Police.”

Musallet’s family is demanding the US State Department lead an investigation into the incident.

“We are devastated that our beloved Sayfollah Musallet (nicknamed Saif) was brutally beaten to death by Israeli settlers while he was protecting his family’s land from settlers who were attempting to steal it,” the family said in a statement.

“We demand justice.”

The US State Department said in a statement to CNN that it is aware of reports of the death of an American in the West Bank, without providing a name.

“Out of respect for the privacy of the family and loved ones during this difficult time, we have no further comment,” a department spokesperson said.

Musallet ran a business in Tampa and had been in the West Bank since June 4 to visit family and friends, the family statement said.

A second Palestinian man died in the attack in Sinjel after he was shot in the chest by settlers, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said. Ten others were wounded in the same attack, it added.

Following the attacks, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs criticised what it called Israel’s expanding settlement projects in the occupied territory and called for urgent action to hold the perpetrators of settler violence accountable.

Israel has recently ramped up military operations in the West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians and razing entire communities as it targets what it says are militants operating in the territory.

Multiple American citizens have been killed in the West Bank in the past few years, according to Palestinian officials and eyewitnesses, including a 14-year-old boy whom the Israeli military shot dead last April in what they described as a “counterterrorism operation.”

Israeli soldiers also shot dead a 26-year-old woman during a protest against an Israeli settlement in September 2024.
(CNN)

Headline

Japan’s Petabit: What To Know About Internet Speed That Can Download 67 Million Songs In A second

Published

1 day ago

July 12, 2025

Editor

Researchers in Japan have broken the record for the fastest internet speed ever recorded: 1.02 petabits per second. That’s fast enough to “download 67 million songs in a second.”

Contents
How Fast is 1.02 Petabits Per Second?How Did Japan Make This Happen?
When Can the World Expect to Use This?

According to FirstPost, this new speed could let someone download the entire Netflix library almost instantly—or stream millions of 8K videos at once without any buffering.

To give some perspective, Japan’s new speed is around 16 million times faster than India’s average internet speed of 63.55 Mbps and 3.5 million times faster than the U.S. average.

How Fast is 1.02 Petabits Per Second?

A petabit is one million gigabits. So when researchers say they hit 1.02 petabits per second, they’re talking about a connection fast enough to transfer more than 100,000 HD movies in just one second.

This speed could technically download the full Netflix catalog in less than a second. Big game downloads, like the 150GB Call of Duty: Warzone, would finish in a flash.

According to Gagadget, the full English Wikipedia is about 100GB. At this speed, you could download it “10,000 times in just one second.”

Music platforms can’t even match the scale. Spotify says a minute of audio uses about 1MB. That means, “with Japan’s new speed, you could theoretically download 67 million songs in a second—that’s more than 1,27,000 years of continuous music.”

While these examples help show how fast this is, the real impact will likely be on emerging technology.

Things like cloud computing, AI, autonomous vehicles, and real-time translation depend on large volumes of data moving quickly. With speeds like this, data centers in different parts of the world could work together almost as if they were on the same local network. That would allow global AI systems to run with almost no delay.

How Did Japan Make This Happen?

The breakthrough came from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), working with Sumitomo Electric and European partners.

The team sent data over 1,800 kilometers—about the distance from Delhi to Goa—using a specially built fiber-optic cable.

Typical fiber cables send data down a single path of light. This new design packs 19 separate cores into a standard-sized fiber, which researchers describe as “a 19-lane superhighway” for internet traffic. It increases capacity without requiring totally new infrastructure.

Sumitomo Electric developed the cable, while NICT and international researchers built the transmission system.

To deal with long-distance signal loss, they used advanced amplification and signal processing. The setup involved 19 loops of fiber, each 86.1 km long, with the signal passed 21 times. That totaled 1,808 km, and during the test, “180 individual data streams were sent at record-breaking speed and stability.”

When Can the World Expect to Use This?

Most home internet is still measured in megabits per second, not terabits, much less talking about petabits. We’re far from seeing these speeds in everyday life. That means using this speed is not anytime soon.

Still, the breakthrough is getting attention from telecom companies, infrastructure providers, and governments. This could help shape the future of undersea cables, national internet backbones, and next-generation networks like 6G.

It may take years to reach consumers, but the progress points toward a future where fast, high-capacity internet becomes standard—not something rare.

(FirstPost/Tribune)