TEL AVIV — An Israeli scuba diver had discovered a 900-year-old Crusader sword in the Mediterranean Sea. The sword, with its 1-metre-long blade and a 30-centimetre-long hilt, was lying on the seabed off the Carmel coast, the Israel Antiquities Authority said on Monday. “The sword, which has been preserved in perfect condition, is a beautiful and rare find and evidently belonged to a Crusader knight,’’ said Nir Distelfeld, inspector for the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Robbery...
Zanzibar-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. “For his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents,” announced the Swedish Academy this morning. The award comes with more than $1 million in prize money. Gurnah was born in 1948. He’s was previously a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England...
No less than 10 Nigerian politicians have been implicated in the Pandora Papers. At least eight African countries are featured in the document. In all, there are 336 politicians listed in the document, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which published the earth-shaking papers on Sunday. The ‘Pandora Papers’ is an investigation based on one of the biggest-ever leaks of financial documents which, on Sunday, exposed a hidden world of shielded wealth belonging...
More than a dozen heads of state and government, including the King of Jordan and the Czech prime minister, have hidden millions in offshore tax havens, according to an investigation published Sunday by the ICIJ media consortium. The so-called “Pandora Papers” investigation — involving some 600 journalists from media including The Washington Post, the BBC, and The Guardian — is based on the leak of some 11.9 million documents from 14 financial services companies around...
MOSCOW — Russia on Friday, October 1, 2021, held its first royal wedding since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution which toppled the Romanov monarchy, with aristocrats that travelled from across Europe for the lavish ceremony. Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov, 40, and his Italian fiancée Rebecca Virginia Bettarini, 39, were wed at Saint Isaac’s cathedral in the former imperial capital Saint Petersburg. Hundreds of foreign guests travelled to Russia’s second city for the Orthodox Christian ceremony,...
ABUJA — The Federal Government has unveiled the activities lined up to commemorate the 2021 edition of the World Teachers Day (WTD), scheduled to hold on Oct. 5. The Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu declared the lineup activities for the 2021 celebration at a news conference in Abuja on Tuesday. Adamu was represented by the Minister of State for Education, Mr. Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba. He said that the 2021 theme designated by UNESCO elucidates how...
Tech giant Apple has announced the new iPhone 13 Pro, the first of its kind offering 1 Terabyte as a storage option, allowing iPhone users to store twice the capacity of the iPhone 13. The new model was announced during the company’s streaming event on Tuesday. Though the tech company has offered 1TB as an iPad storage option, the iPhone models have had a maximum storage capacity of 512GB. “iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13...
MOSCOW — The current inflation spike is expected to be largely temporary, as price pressures are building up only slowly, European Central Bank (ECB) President Cristine Lagarde said on Thursday. In August, inflation rate in the Eurozone jumped to a 10-year-high of 3 per cent according to Eurostat estimates. “The current increase in inflation is expected to be largely temporary and underline price pressures are building up only slowly. “The inflation outlook in our new...
TOKYO — Japan’s former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, a strong contender to become next prime minister, has called for a package of more than 30 trillion yen ($273 billion) to cushion the blow from the coronavirus pandemic, a magazine reported. Suga’s shock Friday announcement that he was stepping down has thrown a ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leadership race set for Sept. 29 wide open, with an array of candidates considering running. Kishida, 64, is...
HANOI — Vietnam has jailed a man for five years for breaking strict Coronavirus (COVID-19) quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported. Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported. Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive...
