Chinese author Mo Yan has won the Nobel Literature Prize for writing that mixes folk tales, history and the contemporary, the Swedish academy has announced.

”Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the Swedish academy said on Thursday.

Yan, whose real name is Guan Moye and was born in 1955, ”with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”, the jury said.

Mo Yan has published novels, short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors, the Nobel committee noted.

In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth.

Last year, the literature prize went to Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer.

The literature prize is the fourth and one of the most watched announcements this Nobel season, following the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry earlier this week.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, with the field of possible winners wide open, followed by the Economics Prize on Monday, wrapping up the Nobel season.

As tradition dictates, the laureates will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the death of prize creator Alfred Nobel in 1896.

Because of the economic crisis, the Nobel Foundation has slashed the prize sum to eight million Swedish kronor ($A1.18 million) per award, down from the 10 million kronor awarded since 2001.

Photo: AFP

I like coffee. I like drinking coffee, I like talking coffee, and I occasionally like writing about coffee. Call it an addiction, but it’s one plenty of Australians seem to share.

But where do you get the best coffee fix when you’re on the road? I compiled a list a few years ago, but I’ve sat around killing time in a lot of cafes since then and I get the feeling it needs updating.

So fellow coffee lovers, do yourself a favour: avoid the genteel café cultures of most of Europe and set your sights further afield. There’s are plenty of great brews to be found around the world.

New Zealand

Along with hairy-footed-gnome movies and robotic rugby players, Kiwis also excel at producing a sensational cup of coffee. Wellington is the country’s king, but you can walk into a café pretty much anywhere across the ditch and be sure that you’ll be served a rich, smooth flat white. Apparently a lot of Kiwis are moving to Australia – as long as they’re baristas it should work out fine.

Morocco

Trust me: sit down at a café and order a “nous-nous”. That’s Arabic for “half-half” – a small glass half-filled with frothy milk and topped up with espresso. It’s the perfect way to drink what is always great coffee around the country, where people sit at cafes French-style, staring out at the crowds, drinking nous-nous produced from hand-pulled espresso machines. It almost makes you forget the lack of booze.

Australia

It’s not just parochialism, we really do great coffee – from the wanky organic free-trade stuff to the regular old cup from your corner store. And it’s not just in Melbourne, the traditional capital of all things hot and caffeinated, but in all of the capital cities, and increasingly in the country… And even out of the country. Together with New Zealand we’re taking the flat white to the world.

Colombia

Up in the coffee-growing regions around Pereira, they do a mean cup of java. The stuff is brewed not with regular water but with sugarcane juice, turning a simple espresso into a sweet, sticky explosion of caffeine and energy. It’s not always served that way, but even the regular stuff in Colombia is up there with the world’s best.

Italy

There is bad coffee in Italy. If you choose to drink your café lattes while sitting down at the touristy piazzas you’re just as likely to be served a steaming bowl of watery milk as a decent brew. Best bet is to seek out the little neighbourhood joints where everyone’s standing at a bar sipping from little cups. Order an espresso, pay your one euro or so, and enjoy.

Argentina

At any given moment on any given day you could ask me what I’d like to be doing and it’s this: sitting at a café in the Buenos Aires suburb of Palermo, people-watching and drinking a “café cortado” with a little glass of sparkling water on the side. The coffee is good in Argentina, and the setting is perfect.

Vietnam

The beans are local. The drip-filters are unique. The shot of condensed milk is perfect. And the addition of some ice cubes in inspired. There are few things better on a sticky Asian day than a glass of cold coffee in Vietnam.

India

When I think back on misty-eyed memories of southern India, there’s one that sticks out furthest: standing on a dirty street in Madurai, an island in the hustle and bustle, sipping a glass of sweet, spiced, milky coffee whipped up by a guy who’s probably been whipping up sweet, spiced, milky coffee his entire life. It tastes like nowhere else.

USA

“More carffee?” That’s the sound most old-school restaurants ring with around the country as waitresses offer to top up your bottomless drink with more percolated bilge. Because when I say the USA, I don’t mean all of the USA. Most coffee in the States isn’t great – up in the Pacific Northwest, however, in places like Seattle and Portland, you’ll have no trouble finding a reasonably sized cup of organic espresso to go with your bran muffin and granola.

Ethiopia

You have to like it black. And thick. And you have to have time on your hands. A “coffee ceremony” in Ethiopia – which involves the roasting, grinding, brewing and serving of coffee – can take up most of your morning, but the resulting pots of tasty black goo are easily worth all of the effort. You’ll drink three cups per ceremony, so don’t plan on a siesta afterwards.

Photo: iStock

London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, has sought to woo talented French immigrants to the British capital and away from the “tyranny” they are suffering under Socialist President Francois Hollande, who has raised taxes on the rich.

Speaking to a rally of Conservative Party members at the Tories’ annual conference in Birmingham today, Mr Johnson invoked the opening line of the French national anthem: “Allons enfants de la patrie,” which translates as, “Let us go, children of the fatherland.”

“We say to the people, not since 1789 has there been such tyranny in France,” Mr Johnson joked, referring to the French revolution. “I am very keen to welcome talented French people to London.”

He noted there are already 240,000 French nationals in the capital.

In June, Prime Minister David Cameron triggered a war of words with France by vowing to “roll out the red carpet” for French companies if Mr Hollande followed through on his election pledge to tax the wealthy.

In its 2013 budget last month, Mr Hollande’s government announced €20 billion ($25.6 billion) in tax increases, including a 75 per cent levy on incomes over 1 million euros, and the elimination of limits on the wealth tax.

A decision by France’s richest man, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton chief executive Bernard Arnault, to seek Belgian citizenship created a media frenzy over tax exiles, prompting the newspaper Liberation to run a front-page headline that read: “Get lost, rich bastard”.

Mr Hollande said on September 9 that it’s patriotic to pay taxes.

Mr Johnson arrived in Birmingham amid continued speculation about whether he intends to challenge Mr Cameron for the Conservative leadership if the Prime Minister fails to secure a majority at the next general election due in 2015.

Buoyed by re-election in May and the success of the London Olympics in August, the mayor has increasingly been touted by Tory activists as a possible successor to Mr Cameron, whose poll ratings have fallen.

Mr Johnson, who has criticised government policy in areas such as welfare, has repeatedly failed to rule himself out as a future Tory leader. In a bid to quell doubts over his loyalty to the Prime Minister, he paid tribute to Mr Cameron.

“No one should have any cause to doubt my admiration for David Cameron,” Mr Johnson said. “In tough circumstances, he and [Chancellor] George Osborne and the rest of the government are doing exactly what’s needed for this country to clear up the mess that Labour left” when it was ousted from power in 2010, leaving a record budget deficit.

A survey of Tory members for the ConservativeHome website found that Mr Johnson had a net satisfaction rating of plus 91, higher than any cabinet minister. Mr Cameron’s was only just positive, at plus one.

Asked at today’s rally about his formula for ensuring the Conservatives beat Labour in the next election in 2015, Mr Johnson said the Tories have to “locate ourselves squarely in the centre ground of UK politics”.

He said he has no “magic prescriptions for winning elections except keep bashing the Labour Party”, which he described as “barely reformed Marxists”.

Mr Johnson “is clearly trying to establish himself as the man the Tories have to turn to when the present leadership is seen to have failed”, his biographer, Andrew Gimson, said.

Photo: Getty Images

A palm-sized Japanese satellite in orbit around Earth will flash a Morse code message that will be visible around the world from next month, the mission commander said on Friday.

Researchers hope the satellite, measuring 10 centimeters cubed and launched from the International Space Station on Friday, will become the first orbiter to transmit an LED message across the night sky.

The message was originally intended to be seen just in Japan, but people around the world have asked for the satellite to communicate when it overflies them, said Takushi Tanaka, professor at The Fukuoka Institute of Technology.

“Requests came from far more people than I expected—a man in Silicon Valley wanted to see it while another man wanted us to flash it over Central Park in New York,” Tanaka told AFP by telephone.

He said he has also received requests from residents of cities in Italy, Germany, Brazil, Britain and Hungary.

“There is no practical aim to this, but it is a fun experiment that everybody can join,” he said.

Observers, ideally with binoculars, will be able to see flashes of light—green in the northern hemisphere, where people will see the “front” of the satellite, and red in the southern hemisphere, where the “back” will be visible.

Morse code uses a series of dots and dashes to represent letters of the alphabet and is commonly understood across the world as a way of transmitting pieces of text.

“A man in Slovakia who has laser beam said he would flash back if he sees the message from space. He wants the satellite to take pictures of his beam and send them to Earth,” Tanaka said.

The professor said his team would try their best to accommodate requests but warned being able to see the Morse code message would be largely dependent on the weather.

The message it will send is “Hi this is Niwaka Japan.” Niwaka is the satellite’s nickname and reflects a play on words in the local dialect of southwestern Japan.

Besides transmitting its LED message, the camera-equipped satellite will also take images of Earth and send them to a base station in an experiment on high-speed data transmissions.

The solar-powered device was released from the International Space Station 390 kilometers above Earth and is now in a regular orbit.

Specific timings and locations will be announced later on the institute’s website in Japanese and English.

Photo AFP

The Assad regime in Syria brought about Muammar Gaddafi’s death by providing France with the key intelligence which led to the operation that killed him, sources in Libya have claimed.

French spies operating in Sirte, Gaddafi’s last refuge, were able to set a trap for the Libyan dictator after obtaining his satellite telephone number from the Syrian government, they said.

In what would amount to an extraordinary betrayal of one Middle Eastern dictator by another, President Bashar al-Assad sold out his fellow tyrant in an act of self-preservation, a former senior intelligence official in Tripoli said.

With international attention switching from Libya to the mounting horrors in Syria, Mr Assad offered Paris the telephone number in exchange for an easing of French pressure on Damascus, Rami El Obeidi said.

”In exchange for this information, Assad had obtained a promise of a grace period from the French and less political pressure on the regime – which is what happened,” Mr Obeidi said.

While it was not possible to verify Mr Obeidi’s allegation independently, the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, played a leading role in both the NATO mission to bomb Libya and in bringing international pressure to bear on the Assad regime.

The claims by Mr Obeidi, the former head of foreign intelligence for the movement that overthrew Gaddafi, followed comments by Mahmoud Jibril, who was prime minister in the transitional government and who now leads one of Libya’s largest political parties.

He confirmed at the weekend that a foreign ”agent” was involved in the operation that killed Gaddafi, but did not identify his nationality.

However, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera quoted Western diplomats in Tripoli as saying that if a foreign agent was involved ”he was almost certainly French”. The news of the Syria deal could potentially embarrass NATO, which initially claimed that it did ”not target individuals”.

The alliance’s official version says an RAF reconnaissance plane spotted a large convoy of vehicles trying to flee Sirte on October 20 last year, two months after Gaddafi fled Tripoli.

NATO warplanes bombed the convoy, apparently unaware of who was travelling in it, before militia fighters found Gaddafi hiding in a drainpipe.

He is believed to have been killed by his captors en route to the city of Misrata, west of Sirte.

But Mr Obeidi said France had essentially masterminded the operation by directing Libyan militiamen to an ambush spot where they could intercept Gaddafi’s convoy. He also suggested that France had little interest in how Gaddafi was treated once captured, although the fighters were encouraged to try to take him alive. ”French intelligence played a direct role in the death of Gaddafi, including his killing,” Mr Obeidi said.

”They gave directions that he was to be apprehended, but they didn’t care if he was bloodied or beaten up as long as he was delivered alive.”

Mr Obeidi said French intelligence began monitoring Gaddafi’s Iridium satellite telephone and made a breakthrough when he rang two of his senior loyalists, Yusuf Shakir and Ahmed Jibril, who had fled to Syria.

A spokesman at the French foreign ministry refused to confirm or deny the claims.

Photo: Reuters

Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn wants to relaunch retro-brand Datsun with a price tag as low as $3,000 when it hits the road in 2014, a report said.

The company will target drivers in developing nations—India, Indonesia and Russia—offering the barebones model at prices that put it well below current Nissan offerings, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The paper, citing interviews with Ghosn and other executives, said Nissan is aiming for six Datsun models at between $3,000 and $5,000, a price that only a handful of Indian- and Chinese-made cars could compete with.

To cut costs, the company will source parts almost entirely from the country in which the finished product is to be made and sold.

And the absence of rigorous safety standards that would be applied to models aimed at the US or European markets will also help keep the price down, the paper reported.

“If you go to the US, it’s not going to end up being $3,000,” Ghosn told the paper in an article published Monday.

The Brazilian-born Ghosn said a future Datsun would be “modern and fresh” and had to appeal to buyers in developing markets because it would make “them feel good and is in their budget”.

He said the new brand will be one of Nissan’s primary “accelerators of growth”, in the campaign to grab eight percent of the world market by 2016, up from six percent at present.

All of which means boosting sales in emerging economies, which the company expects will account for three-fifths of all sales five years from now, compared with 43 percent now.

The resurrection of Datsun marks the return of a car with something of a cult following, more than three decades after it was phased out.

Datsun—the first set of wheels for many adolescents—was a big seller especially in the United States where its sporty, two-door hatchbacks became synonymous with fuel-efficiency during the 1970s oil crisis.

Analysts have said the plan to reanimate the brand could help Nissan get around the problem of producing vehicles cheap enough to compete in emerging markets without polluting existing—more expensive—marques.

Nissan’s move underscores the growing importance of emerging economies, a key battlefield among global carmakers as growth in developed markets stagnates.

Photo AFP

Philippine President Benigno Aquino announced Sunday that a deal had been reached with Muslim separatist rebels to end a decades-long insurgency that has left more than 150,000 people dead.

“This framework agreement paves the way for a final and enduring peace in Mindanao,” Aquino said, referring to the southern third of the Philippines that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front regards as its ancestral homeland.

“It brings all former secessionist groups into the fold. No longer does the Moro Islamic Liberation Front aspire for a separate state.”

Aquino said that the agreement paves the way for the creation of a new semi-autonomous Muslim region in parts of Mindanao, which is one of the country’s most resource-rich and fertile areas.

However, the national government would retain control over defense and security, as well as foreign and monetary policy.

Aquino said the agreement, achieved after many rounds of peace talks in Malaysia, would have to be ratified by the people of the Philippines through a plebiscite.

Aquino gave no time frame for when the final peace with the 12,000-strong MILF would be achieved, although his aides had previously said they were aiming for before the president ends his term in mid-2016.

There are roughly four million Muslims in Mindanao, which they see as their ancestral homeland dating back to Islamic sultanates established before Spanish Christians arrived in the 1500s.

The MILF and other Muslim rebel groups have been fighting for independence or autonomy in Mindanao since the early 1970s.

The rebellion has claimed more than 150,000 lives, most in the 1970s when all-out war raged, and left large parts of Mindanao in deep poverty.

The MILF is the biggest and most important rebel group left, after the Moro National Liberation Front signed a peace pact with the government in 1996.

Photo: AFP

North Korea hopes to complete within three years an ambitious but long-delayed hotel under construction in Pyongyang for 25 years, a travel firm said Friday after it was given rare access to the site.

The hotel has come in for much criticism over the years, with Esquire magazine once dubbing it “the worst building in the history of mankind”.

Former North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, who died last year, reportedly ordered construction of the 105-storey pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel in 1987.

But the project has been repeatedly delayed and for many stands as a symbol of the persistent economic problems plaguing the country, a Stalinist state with a barely functioning economy that has suffered from famines in recent years.

As the North’s economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s, the empty shell became a symbol of the country’s failure, earning the nicknames “Hotel of Doom” and “Phantom Hotel.”

Beijing-based company Koryo Tours, which organises trips to North Korea, was granted a rare glimpse of the hotel last week.

During the visit, manager Hannah Barraclough and a colleague were told that North Korean authorities “say it will be two or three more years before the building is complete”.

Photos taken by Koryo Tours reveal a vast but still unfinished concrete interior.

“The atrium, when you walk into the hotel, is covered in glass and full of light,” said Barraclough, adding that the glass cladding covering the hotel is nearly completed.

The hotel boasts a ninety-fifth floor viewing platform offering “an amazing panoramic view over Pyongyang” and it will house a massive banquet hall as well as offices and apartments, she said.

Barraclough added that the hotel is likely to remain closed to tourists until its interior is finished.

For a time, the North airbrushed images of the Ryugyong Hotel from photographs.

North Korea has one of the world’s most rigidly-controlled economies and is desperately poor following decades of mismanagement and isolation, as well as the imposition of international sanctions over its nuclear programme.

Estimates published in South Korean have put the costs of completing the hotel and making it structurally sound at as much as US$2 billion (A$1.93 billion), more than 10 per cent of the North’s yearly gross domestic product.

North Korea watchers and media reports in South Korea say Kim Jong-Un, who took over as leader after his father’s death in December, has shown signs of promoting market reforms in a bid to stimulate the economy.

Photo: AFP

Australians download music illegally more frequently, by head of population, than any other country. At the same time we also happily pay for downloads and still buy physical albums at a rate which surprises the industry worldwide.

According to a survey of downloads from bit torrent sites conducted by Musicmetric, a self-described data and analytics company, Australia, with just over 19 million downloads, placed sixth in the top 10 for music downloads in the past year. The top downloading nation was the US which, according to Musicmetric, downloaded music 96,681,133 times, more than double the next nearest nation, Britain, which had a little over 43 million downloads.

However, by size, Australia with a population of 23 million for those 19 million downloads was comfortably the most frequent user of unofficial or illegal sites. And the most popular artist downloaded in Australia was Adelaide hip-hop group the Hilltop Hoods.

Dylan Liddy, manager of the Hilltop Hoods, was wary of accepting the Musicmetric figures but was relatively sanguine about the impact of illegal downloads on sales.

“We are in the business of selling records so it would be great if we could monetise everything. But at the moment, the way that the music world has moved is getting illegal downloads and that’s very hard to police,” he said.

Asked if there was anything positive about the number of illegal downloads, Liddy laughed and said: “It is what is. It’s great that the boys are popular.”

However, Liddy also pointed out that it’s not as if the Adelaide crew are having trouble selling legally in a country where overall sales have held up better than almost every other market around the world. The Hilltop Hoods latest album, Drinking From the Sun, is still in the top 40 of the Australian sales charts after seven weeks, having reached No.1 and sold in excess of 70,000 copies in physical and digital forms.

“We are tremendously successful in the digital world,” Liddy said. “We have a lot of people downloading from various retail sites, legitimate retail sites, and that has done very well for us in the last couple of years. Our fan base is very tech-savvy and very online-savvy so it goes hand in hand. But it also goes hand in hand with the overall market which is moving towards a lot of digital sales as well.”

While caution need be applied to these new figures as there is no information yet on the methodology or reach of the Musicmetric survey, nor has Fairfax seen the full survey results, the figures are an interesting comparison with those supplied by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) for 2011 and suggest a market comfortable with sourcing digital music.

According to ARIA, legal digital sales have kept rising, with sales up 37 per cent last year, and digital sales’ overall share of the music market in Australia also reaching 37 per cent. This was during a year when several streaming and online sales sites began operating in Australia or were set up by local retailers.

The dollar value of music purchases in 2011 was $382,772,000, down slightly on 2010. The largest growth was for digital albums, something also reflected in the Musicmetric report which found that albums were by far the most popular form download, ahead of single track downloads.

Nonetheless, ARIA’s own figures suggest 25 per cent of downloading was conducted from illegal sites.

Prague’s homeless have found a way to profit from the city’s flourishing tourism industry: By offering an alternative to mainstream tour guides. The unorthodox chaperones show visitors another side to the city, from the people who know it best.

The forays into Prague’s gritty underbelly offer visitors a glimpse at places inhabited by the city’s poor and homeless.

“The guide has opened quite a different view of Prague for me,” Tobias, a German sightseer who participated in the tour said. The experience had “opened the world of the homeless to him,” he said.

The initiative, dubbed ‘Pragulic,’ targets both Czech and foreign tourists. There are currently ten such tours being offered, focusing on both the city’s downtown and outskirts.

“No one knows the streets like a homeless person does,” Pragulic founder Katarina Chalupkova told Czech publication The Prague Post. She claimed that the homeless-led tours were first devised by the guides themselves.

The tours cost around 200 Czech crowns ($10), half of which goes to the guide. Jan Badalec, a recovering alcoholic and one of the eight guides working for Pragulic, said that the initiative offered him the opportunity to improve his life.

“I’m trying to make the most of what life dealt me, and with the help of God, I am,” Badalec said.

Pragulic’s three founders– Tereza Jureckova, Katarina Chalupkova and Ondrj Klugl – say that the project will “contribute to the improvement of the situation” for the homeless, and will help combat negative stereotypes.

Prague has a population of 1.2 million people, some 4000 of whom are estimated to be homeless and are often “quite happily” ignored by the rest of the city. “Many people really criticize the homeless, they throw them all into the same bag, and that’s just not right,” Pragulic’s founders said.

Pragulic is not the first enterprise of its kind in Europe: For a number of years, London’s ‘Sock Mob’ offered tours led by homeless or formerly homeless people, claiming they offered a window into “unseen London.”

Photo/Michal Cizek