Titled “Gibbet Hill”, the story was uncovered by Brian Cleary in a Christmas supplement of the Dublin edition of the Daily Mail newspaper from 1890 and had remained undocumented for more than 130 years.

The rare find, which has never been referenced in any Stoker bibliography or biography, is now being brought to the public for the first time at an exhibition in the Irish capital.

“Dracula”, the Gothic, mysterious and supernatural vampire novel from 1897 may have been set in Transylvania and England but its author, Stoker, was a Dubliner.

“I read ‘Dracula’ as a child and it stuck with me, I read everything from and about Stoker that I could get my hands on,” said Cleary, 44, a writer and amateur historian who lives in the Marino neighbourhood of Dublin where the author grew up.

Thanks to “Dracula”, Stoker “had a massive impact on popular culture, but is under-appreciated”, Cleary told AFP in the Casino at Marino, an opulent 18th-century building near the writer’s birthplace that is hosting the exhibition.

‘Flabbergasted’

Cleary’s journey of discovery began in 2021 when a sudden onset of deafness changed his life.

While on leave to retrain his hearing after having cochlear implant surgery, Cleary visited the National Library of Ireland to indulge his interest in historical literature and the works of Stoker.

There, in October 2023, he chanced upon the hidden literary gem, the “Gibbet Hill” story which he had never heard of before.

“I sat in the library flabbergasted, that I was looking at potentially a lost ghost story from Stoker, especially one from around the time he was writing ‘Dracula’, with elements of ‘Dracula’ in it,” said Cleary.

“I sat looking at the screen wondering, am I the only living person who had read it? Followed by, what on earth do I do with it?”

Cleary did extensive literary searches to verify the find and consulted Stoker expert and biographer Paul Murray who confirmed the story was unknown, lost and buried in the archives for more than 130 years.

“‘Gibbet Hill’ is very significant in terms of Stoker’s development as a writer, 1890 was when he was a young writer and made his first notes for ‘Dracula’,” Murray told AFP.

“It’s a classic Stoker story, the struggle between good and evil, evil which crops up in exotic and unexplained ways, and is a way station on his route to publishing ‘Dracula’.”

Illustrations

The macabre tale tells of a sailor murdered by three criminals whose bodies were strung up on a gibbet or hanging gallows on a hill as a ghostly warning to passing travellers.

To celebrate the discovery, “Gibbet Hill” has been captured in a book that features cover art and illustrations inspired by the story by respected Irish artist Paul McKinley.

“It’s quite surreal now to be standing next to a picture inspired by three of the characters in the story,” said Cleary.

“When Brian sent me the ‘Gibbet Hill’ there was so much I could work with,” said McKinley.

His eery, sometimes sinister illustrations include a “juicy, wet, oily painting” of worms inspired by a young character in the story who has a bunch of earthworms in his hands.

“Making new images for an old story that has been buried for so long” was a “fascinating challenge” said the artist.

© Agence France-Presse

The 47-year-old Cork native won his first Oscar on Sunday — on his first nomination — for his leading role in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”, capping a glittering awards season that saw him snare a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and other prizes. 

He bested a stacked field that included four American rivals — Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction), Bradley Cooper (Maestro) and Colman Domingo (Rustin).

“We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb. And for better or for worse, we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world”, Murphy said as he received an ovation from the audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

“So I would really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers, everywhere.”

Murphy’s portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the US physicist who masterminded the atomic bomb, has been widely lauded, and is the culmination of years of fruitful collaboration with Nolan, which has included six films together. 

“I knew the character was so much in his head and that the performance was so much interior, how you could transmit thought process through the face, the eyes,” Murphy told the BBC.  

After all the accolades for “Oppenheimer”, the Irishman’s thin face, trademark sculpted cheekbones and piercing blue eyes are likely to become even more globally recognisable.

The veteran performer’s film career has already included standout roles in acclaimed epics like Nolan’s “Dunkirk” and Ken Loach’s Irish historical drama “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”.

But for many fans, he is Birmingham gangland boss Tommy Shelby, from the wildly popular television drama “Peaky Blinders”.

Murphy has not shied away from conflicted roles, playing the villainous Scarecrow in Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy and a transgender woman in the 1970s-set “Breakfast on Pluto”.   

“I’ve always been interested in the melancholic, or the ambiguous, or the more transgressive — that, to me, is drama, getting into those knotty places. I find it really stimulating,” he told Esquire magazine for a 2022 profile.

‘Analogue’  

Despite his burgeoning fame, Murphy is often described as humble — a profile helped by an aversion to technology and social media that translates into maintaining an internet and telephone-free home.

“He’s the most analogue individual you could possibly encounter,” said “Oppenheimer” producer Emma Thomas, who is Nolan’s wife.   

Murphy is also known for trying to avoid excessive media attention.  

“If you behave like a celebrity, then people will treat you like a celebrity, and if you don’t, they won’t,” the actor told the Irish Times. 

“There’s not much to write about me in the tabloids.”

Born to language teacher parents in Cork, Murphy played guitar as a teenager and formed an avant-garde rock band with school pals called “Son of Mr. Green Genes” after a Frank Zappa track. 

“Music was what I wanted to do, and for a while, it looked like it would work out,” Murphy told the BBC.

However, bowing to parental pressure, the band members turned down a record company deal.

With the door closed on one passion, another door opened in 1996 when, aged 20, he quit a law degree and set out on an acting career.  

“I’d probably have been wealthier if I had stayed with law, but pretty miserable doing it,” he confided in one interview.

‘Chameleon’

Murphy had dipped his toe into acting at both school and university in Cork, where an English teacher and early mentor William Wall described him as a “chameleon of an actor”. 

In 1996, after pestering a local director, Murphy landed a lead part in the frenetic “Disco Pigs”, a play written by fellow Corkonian Enda Walsh. 

The stage show was a critical success, going on an 18-month world tour, and Murphy never looked back.  

His big cinema break came in 2002 when Scottish director Danny Boyle gave him the lead in post-apocalyptic London horror flick “28 Days Later”. 

Then in 2005, Nolan cast Murphy in “Batman Begins”, the first chapter of the “Dark Knight” trilogy starring Christian Bale as the Caped Crusader.

Regular film appearances followed, after which came “Peaky Blinders” from 2013 to 2022 — which is set largely in the period between the two world wars.

Married to Irish artist Yvonne McGuinness for the past 20 years, the couple and their two sons moved back to Ireland in 2014 after more than a decade in London to reconnect with their homeland. 

His latest film “Small Things Like These” about the country’s mother and baby homes scandal — which he produced as well as stars in — opened last month at the Berlin film festival to stellar reviews.  

Murphy still finds time to host the occasional late night BBC radio show, serving up an eclectic mix of his favourite tunes alongside commentary in a soothing Cork accent. 

© Agence France-Presse

After hours of painstaking swilling, spitting and note-taking this week, judges at the Brazilian round of the international Cup of Excellence competition whittled the field down to 11 finalists from 56 entries.

The judges said the quality of the Brazilian coffee had improved this year despite a wet harvest period that spoiled large quantities of produce in the world’s top grower.

”I honestly think the quality is much better this year. A lot of people told me quality would be lower because of the rains but the top-tier coffees are presenting much better characteristics than in other years,” said chief judge Erwin Mierisch.

The Cup of Excellence, sponsored in Brazil by the export promotion agency Apex, holds annual competitions to seek South and Central America’s best produce. It aims to expand the market for high quality coffee to give growers the incentive to produce better beans.

Begun a decade ago to counter the perception that Brazil had little to offer beyond its large supply of bulk coffee, it has spread to other producers in the region. East African nation Rwanda now also takes part.

Judges paced up and down with silver spoons, sampling the line of coffees, each of which had been roasted for the same time and at the same temperature and ground in a machine cleaned repeatedly to avoid contamination. Their faces gave nothing away as they made notes in silence before moving on to the next sample.

”I immediately spotted one which was outstanding. I gave it a 97 score,” out of a possible 100, said Vytautas Kratulis, director of Sviezia Kava, a roaster in Lithuania after the cupping process ended.

He also preferred this year’s coffees over last year’s. Still, he said he expected quality coffee would be in shorter supply in his country this year and at higher costs. The global economic crisis has hit Baltic states particularly hard, making Lithuanian coffee drinkers reluctant to pay premium prices.

Tired mouths
Judges drifted out of the sampling room, mouths tired after forcefully drawing coffees dozens of times from the spoon with loud rasps, and congregated to discuss the qualities of each entry.

Numbers eight and 11 emerged as two potential winners. Judges compared their flavours to pineapple or red berries while others were likened to chocolate or butter.

Judges laughed as one peer described a coffee as having a ”taco” taste and another’s acidity as ”polite, not aggressive”.

Coffee number eight emerged a fraction of a point ahead of 11 at the award ceremony on Friday night. The grower, Candido Rosa, was from Bahia in the north-east, a hotter, drier state than where most of the moisture-loving trees grow in Brazil.

He was presented with a plaque made with coffee beans.

Japanese coffee roaster Yuko Itoi, who has travelled to other rounds of the contest in Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia and Guatemala as well as Brazil this year, said the Cup of Excellence label was increasingly recognised back at home.

”Little by little we can now see Cup of Excellence coffee in famous department stores and coffee stores,” she said. Japan is often one of the main buyers in the online auctioning of the winning and runner up coffees in the Brazilian round which will take place on January 19.

Itoi said Japanese consumers had a soft spot for Brazilian coffee, even though not an elite origin like Colombia or Guatemala, because their countrymen had helped make Brazil into the world’s biggest producer.

”For Japan, Brazil coffee has a very special position because we immigrated 100 years ago” to farm it in Brazil, she said. – AFP

Ministers from the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) were meeting on Friday in Côte d’Ivoire to agree a common approach ahead of talks later this month with the EU over signing of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).

These EPAs are set to replace trade arrangements giving African, Caribbean and Pacific states preferential access to the EU market. These preferences have to be scrapped to conform with World Trade Organisation (WTO) principles.

Anti-poverty campaigners say this shift to the EPA will expose fragile industry in poor African nations to crushing competition from more modern, efficient EU-based firms.

But Brussels, which is pushing the December 31 deadline, says it will boost their economies and attract investment towards them.

”West Africa isn’t ready to sign such an agreement by 31 December,” Ablasse Ouedraogo, special adviser for trade negotiations to the Ecowas president, told Reuters late on Thursday before the start of the West African meeting.

While EU chiefs were pushing for an interim agreement, Ecowas ministers wanted to pursue a legal derogation that would postpone the introduction of the EPA to conform with WTO rules.

”We will then have the time to continue the [EPA] negotiations before the WTO can take action [against us],” he said, adding it ”should take less than two years” for the West African bloc to prepare to sign the deal.

Compromise

”It is the most logical and realistic way,” he said, speaking in Côte d’Ivoire’s economic capital Abidjan.

EU officials have refused to countenance a postponement and have urged African officials to knuckle-down to negotiations.

”It is a WTO imposed deadline. We are governed by international rules and we intend to stick to them. Our waiver expires at the end of this year and we need a successor regime by the end of this year,” Peter Power, spokesperson for EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, told Reuters in Brussels.

Ouedraogo said he was confident the two trading blocs would reach an agreement that would avoid any disruption to trade with the EU, West Africa’s number one trading partner.

”There won’t be any worst case scenario. As much as Africa needs the EU, the EU needs Africa. We will find a compromise to enable exchanges to continue that will reinforce the partnership and cooperation between West Africa and the EU,” he said.

Pacific countries have made more progress and this week agreed with the EU to seek a pre-EPA interim deal that would include a timetable for cutting tariffs on goods, rules of origin and safeguard mechanisms to slow sudden surges of imports. – Reuters

Gadaffi, long regarded as a pariah in the West for his anti-colonial rhetoric, is touring West Africa to promote the long-standing plan for a pan-African government, which will be put to a summit of the African Union on July 1 in Ghana.

Flush with cash from an oil boom, the leader of the North African Arab state has won backing from Senegal, Zimbabwe and some other countries. But diplomatic heavyweights like South Africa and Uganda are staunch opponents.

Many ordinary Africans say it is premature for the continent of nearly one billion people divided between rich and poor, black and Arab, Muslim and Christian, and criss-crossed by conflicts like the wars in Somalia and Sudan’s western region of Darfur.

”It’s a good idea but it’s far-fetched. We have so many different ideologies, different tribes, traditions and religions,” said Jubilee Kamara (50), a teacher in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. ”You have got to have a common dream and that one will take time — it could be 50 years to even get close.”

In areas like trade, where Africa’s impoverished farmers have clamoured in vain for the United States and Europe to scrap billions of dollars of subsidies, the continent could benefit from more negotiating power, officials say.

”When you are many, you’re stronger. That can solve problems in exchanges with foreign countries because [Africans] very often lose out,” said Sebastien Djedje, Reconciliation Minister of war-torn Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which Gadaffi visited on Wednesday.

But existing pan-African institutions have failed to gain traction. A degree of political and military cooperation occurs through the African Union, but its pan-African Parliament is widely seen as a talking shop while the continent’s long-serving presidents jealously guard their grip on power.

”I can’t see any African leader agreeing to be like a senator in his own country,” said John Muchiri, a taxi driver in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. ”The stronger countries would probably want to rule the rest.”

Renewed credibility

The success of blocs like the expanded European Union has given renewed credibility to the idea pioneered by Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to become the first black nation in sub-Saharan Africa to throw off the colonial yoke 50 years ago.

Nkrumah and other independence leaders like Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere wished to scrap the artificial frontiers drawn up by colonial rulers at the conference of Berlin in 1884.

Many people question, however, whether there is a common African identity spanning the continent that would bond it together. Others wonder how a central government could impose policies some states may not have the means to implement.

On the streets of the continent’s wealthiest country, citizens worried they would end up footing the bill.

”We’ve got enough problems in South Africa. How many problems are we going to have if we have one government,” said Kallie van der Merwe (52), a tour bus driver. ”Where’s all the money coming from? From South Africa? Then we are going to pay tax like hell.”

And on a continent ravaged by rebellions often supported from neighbouring countries, some find it hard to imagine governments putting aside conflicts stretching back decades.

”There are some countries which are perennial enemies and for any sort of United Africa to work there must be understanding between countries like Ethiopia and Eritrea and peace in Sudan and Somalia,” said 20-year-old international relations student Anne Nyambura in Nairobi. — Reuters

President Laurent Gbagbo and rebel leader Guillaume Soro signed the deal on Sunday in neighbouring Burkina Faso after their representatives spent nearly a month discussing disarmament, Ivorian nationality and new elections.

Rebels seized the northern half of the world’s top cocoa grower in a 2002 to 2003 civil war, which erupted after they attempted to topple Gbagbo. A string of United Nations-mandated deals have failed as the foes bickered over how to implement them.

Though fighting during the civil war was brief, the former haven of peace in conflict-prone West Africa has seen poverty spread while the political crisis endures. The former French colony has been destabilised by frequent rioting and protests.

”It’s a joy. If they accept to do what they have agreed to, everyone will win,” said Jean N’Degbe, a retired primary school teacher walking past a cluster of roadside vendors on his way through the Cocody suburb of the economic capital, Abidjan.

France, which has expressed its willingness to scale back its obligations in Côte d’Ivoire, also welcomed the deal.

But some diplomats greeted it with caution, saying with both sides benefiting from the status quo, it remained to be seen whether it would be implemented.

”It is encouraging that they have come to an agreement,” a United States diplomat said. ”All kinds of things have been agreed to in the past but the problem has always been in the implementation.”

The deal foresees a new transitional government within five weeks and the relaunch of a stalled voter registration and identification process to enable elections within 10 months — slightly later than a UN imposed end-October deadline.

It also calls on the UN and French military, which have more than 11 000 peacekeepers in the country, to slowly withdraw their troops from the zone running across the country that keeps rebel and government forces apart.

The two forces are to partially merge before a new national army is formed.

”We’re optimistic and we hope this agreement will be applied for the happiness of Ivorians,” said secondary school teacher Moussa Kone in the rebel stronghold city of Bouake in the north.

”The two sides have finally understood that their combatants are no longer willing to fight,” he said.

Gbagbo, whose mandate officially expired in 2005 but has been twice-extended under UN-backed deals, has frequently denounced foreign meddling in Côte d’Ivoire in the past.

One pro-Gbagbo newspaper among the country’s fiercely partisan press hailed the deal, which resulted from the talks he initiated, as the start of ”a new era”. Few opposition papers made any comment, merely presenting the content of the plan. — Reuters

Ten people have been charged under the West African state’s toxic waste laws and imprisoned in the main city Abidjan, where the deadly black sludge was discarded at several open-air sites after being unloaded from a tanker.

These included two French executives for Trafigura Beheer BV, a major oil and oil products trader which chartered the vessel, the Greek-owned Probo Koala.

The two men, Trafigura director Claude Dauphin and West Africa manager Jean-Pierre Valentini, face additional charges under the former French colony’s poisoning laws.

”For poisoning, it’s a sentence of 20 years in prison and for the infraction relating to the toxic waste, it’s a sentence of between 15 and 20 years,” Aly Yeo, chief of staff to the justice minister, told Reuters on Friday.

”[The two Frenchmen] have been charged with poisoning which means administering a substance which can harm or kill the population,” he said, adding anyone convicted of multiple offences would serve their sentences concurrently.

Thousands suffered vomiting, stomach pains, nausea, breathing difficulties and nosebleeds caused by pungent fumes from the waste, which independent experts say contained hydrogen sulphide, a chemical which can be deadly in high concentrations.

Trafigura described the substance unloaded from the vessel as slops from the gasoline blend stock cargo it had been carrying and said it contained a mixture of gasoline, water and caustic washings.

The firm said it advised Ivorian authorities that the waste needed to be disposed of correctly and had delivered it in Abidjan to a local Ivorian waste disposal firm, Tommy, which it said had government approval to handle the chemical slops.

Public outcry over the dumping, which caused panic in Abidjan and sent more than 60 000 people rushing to hospitals, caused the Ivorian government to resign earlier this month.

President Laurent Gbagbo last week named a new mostly unchanged government for the divided country, split since a 2002-2003 civil war between a rebel-held north and government-controlled south.

Yeo said the judicial investigation could take months and could draw upon evidence gathered by a month-long inquiry launched on Thursday by interim prime minister Charles Konan Banny.

He said a further five people, including truck drivers and warehousemen who handled the waste, had been charged but not detained and that further arrests were likely. – Reuters