The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 is to be divided in three equal parts between Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work. We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.
In October 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325. The resolution for the first time made violence against women in armed conflict an international security issue. It underlined the need for women to become participants on an equal footing with men in peace processes and in peace work in general.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is Africa’s first democratically elected female president. Since her inauguration in 2006, she has contributed to securing peace in Liberia, to promoting economic and social development, and to strengthening the position of women. Leymah Gbowee mobilized and organized women across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women’s participation in elections. She has since worked to enhance the influence of women in West Africa during and after war. In the most trying circumstances, both before and during the “Arab spring”, Tawakkul Karman has played a leading part in the struggle for women’s rights and for democracy and peace in Yemen.
It is the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s hope that the prize to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman will help to bring an end to the suppression of women that still occurs in many countries, and to realise the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.
OSLO, Norway (AP) — The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen for their work on women's rights.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee honored the three women "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
FILE - In this July 21, 1997 file photo, Liberian presidential candidate Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf speaks to her supporters asking them to keep faith and solidarity while the vote counting from Sunday's presidential election continues, Monrovia, Liberia. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen have won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday, Oct. 7, 2011. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
"I am very very happy about this prize," said Karman, a 32-year-old mother of three who heads the human rights group Women Journalists without Chains. She has been a leading figure in organizing protests President Ali Abdullah Saleh that kicked off in late January as part of a wave of anti-authoritarian revolts that have convulsed the Arab world.
"I give the prize to the youth of revolution in Yemen and the Yemeni people," Karman told The Associated Press.
Johnson Sirleaf, 72, is a Harvard-trained economist who became Africa's first democratically elected female president in 2005.
She faces a presidential poll this month.
She was seen as a reformer and peacemaker in Liberia when she took office. But recently, opponents in the presidential campaign have accused her of buying votes and using government funds to campaign. Her camp denies the charges.
Liberia was ravaged by civil wars for years until 2003. The country is still struggling to maintain a fragile peace with the help of U.N. peacekeepers.
Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, organized a group of Christian and Muslim women to challenge Liberia's warlords. In 2009 she won a Profile in Courage Award, an honor named for a 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by John F. Kennedy, for her work in emboldening women in Liberia.
Karman's father is a former legal affairs minister under Saleh. She is a journalist and member of Islah party, an Islamic party.
"We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society," the prize committee said.
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OSLO, Norway (AP) — Arab Spring or European Union? Speculation ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement on Friday is split after cryptic comments by the award committee's chairman.
Thorbjoern Jagland, General Secretary of the Council of Europe and Norwegian chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize award committee gestures during an interview with the Associated Press at his office at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011. Jagland says his panel has already decided on its laureate for this year and he is confident that the selection will be well-received. (AP Photo/Christian Lutz)
Many Nobel watchers have seen the revolutions against autocratic regimes in North Africa and the Middle East as the most likely subject of this year's prize. An American
professor who wrote a guide to nonviolent protests was a bookmaker's favorite Thursday.
But Norway's TV2 expected the prize to go to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, while remarks by Thorbjoern Jagland, who has led the five-member Norwegian panel
since 2009, have fueled speculation the prize could go to the EU.
Even though Norway is not a member, Jagland is a strong supporter of the 27-nation bloc, which many consider a peace-building project as much as an economic union.
In 1990, Jagland wrote a book titled "My European dream" about European unity following the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Aside from his Nobel duties he serves as
secretary-general of the Council of Europe, a European human rights organization that is separate from the EU.
Jagland told The Associated Press this week that the prize — decided last Friday — would go to something "obvious" that he considered "the most positive development" in the world right now.
On Thursday he told Norwegian newspaper VG that this year's winner "is involved with something that has been important to me my whole life."
In several interviews he's suggested that Norwegian media are looking in the wrong places — and most of them have speculated about the award going to someone linked to the Arab Spring.
The deadline for nominations was Feb. 1, and committee members could add their own suggestions until Feb. 28. Jagland told AP that was "not necessarily" too late for consideration of leaders of the Arab Spring revolutions, which toppled regimes in Tunisia in January and Egypt in February.
But he added "that doesn't mean that the prize goes in that direction, because there are many other positive developments in the world."
The EU, or some institution within it, could be a strong candidate if the committee views the prize as a booster shot, like it had intended with the 2009 award to Barack Obama in the first year of his presidency.
The European debt crisis has put the bloc under heavy pressure, with Greece, Portugal and Ireland needing bailouts from international creditors including other nations in the 17-nation eurozone that uses the common euro currency.
But Sverre Lodgaard, a deputy member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee who didn't take part in its deliberations, told reporters Wednesday that he didn't believe in an EU award because it's a divisive issue in Norway.
Leading Nobel-guesser Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, also doubted that the EU would get the prize.
His top picks are Egyptian activists Israa Abdel Fattah, Ahmed Maher and the April 6 Youth Movement, a pro-democracy Facebook group they co-founded in 2008.
He also suggested Wael Ghonim, a marketing executive for Google, for re-energizing the protests on Cairo's Tahrir Square after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, and
Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni who started criticizing the Tunisian regime before the uprising began in December.
Another candidate could be Turkey's Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Harpviken said, to honor Turkish peace efforts "as a bridge builder between east and west."
Betting site paddypower.com gave the lowest odds Thursday to retired American scholar Gene Sharp, whose writings on nonviolent resistance are believed to have inspired some protesters in the Arab world. The second-lowest odds were given to Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar, a recurring name in Nobel speculation over the years.
Others getting bets include the Russian human rights organization Memorial and its founder Svetlana Gannushkina, and the social networking site Facebook.
Norway's TV2 predicted that Johnson Sirleaf would get the prize for promoting peace, democracy and economic growth in her country and advocating for women's rights at the U.N.
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STOCKHOLM (AP) — The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded on Thursday to Tomas Transtromer of Sweden, whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him wide recognition as the most influential Scandinavian poet of recent decades.
Characterized by powerful imagery, Transtromer's poems are often built around his own experiences and infused with his love of music and nature. His later poems are darker, probing existential questions of life, death and disease.
In this undated photo provided by Bloodaxe Books on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer poses for a photograph at an unknown location. The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011 to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him acclaim as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since World War II. (AP Photo/Paula Transtromer, Bloodaxe Books) EDITORIAL USE ONLY
"Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams. Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler sinks toward the green zone of morning," the prelude reads. "Things flare up. From the viewpoint of the quivering lark he is aware of the huge root systems of the trees, their swaying underground lamps. But aboveground there's greenery — a tropical flood of it — with lifted arms, listening to the beat of an invisible pump."
A psychologist and avid amateur pianist, Transtromer (TRAWN-stroh-mur), 80, suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him half-paralyzed and unable to speak, but he continued to write and published a collection of poems — "The Great Enigma" — in 2004. He has since retired from writing.
Transtromer has been a perennial favorite for the Nobel and in recent years Swedish journalists have waited outside Transtromer's apartment in Stockholm on the day the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award is announced.
"He's writing about big questions. He's writing about death, he's writing about history and memory, and nature," said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize.
Transtromer is the first Swede to receive the literature prize since Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson shared it in 1974. Englund has said that the academy is especially cautious about awarding Swedish writers out of fear of being seen as biased.
"I think we've been quite thoughtful and haven't been rash," Englund said after the award was announced.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said the award made him "happy and proud," and he hoped it would draw global attention to Swedish literature.
The Swedish Academy has also been criticized for being too Euro-centric, ignoring writers from other parts of the world. Seven of the last 10 winners have been Europeans.
Born in Stockholm in 1931, Transtromer was raised by his mother, a teacher, after she divorced his father — a journalist. He started writing poetry while studying at the Sodra Latin school in Stockholm.
His work was published in several journals before he published his first book of poetry, "17 poems," in 1954, winning much acclaim in Sweden.
He studied literature, history, poetics, the history of religion and psychology at Stockholm University, and later divided his time between poetry and his work as a psychologist. Between 1960 and 1966 he worked as psychologist at Roxtuna, an institution for juvenile offenders.
Transtromer's most famous works include the 1966 "Windows and Stones," in which he depicts themes from his many travels, and "Baltics" from 1974.
Since the 1950's, Transtromer has had a close friendship with American poet Robert Bly, who translated many of his works into English. In 2001, Transtromer's Swedish publishing house Bonniers published the correspondence between the two writers in the book "Air Mail."
Earlier this year, Bonniers released a collection of his works between 1954 and 2004 to celebrate the poet's 80th birthday.
"We have waited and waited, we had nearly stopped hoping (for a Nobel) but still not given up the last strand of hope," said Anna Tillgren, spokeswoman for the publisher. "We are overwhelmed. This is the happiest day ever for many of us working at the publishing house."
British bookmaker Ladbrokes said a surge of late bets on Thursday had made Transtromer the 4/6 favorite for the prize.
"He was second favorite to begin with and stayed quite prominent throughout," said spokesman Alex Donohue.
"This morning he became the favorite after a surge of late bets, several of which were from Sweden," he said, adding the betting pattern wasn't suspicious.
"The nearer you get to the event, there are always going to be people who have an idea of what is going on ... we're certainly not suggesting anything untoward was going on."
The Nobel Prize, considered one of the highest accolades in literature, is given only to living writers. The academy's choices sometimes spark heated debate among literature experts.
Some of its previous picks were obscure even to literature experts, while others were widely celebrated authors decorated with numerous other awards.
Acclaimed writers who never won the Nobel include Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Graham Greene.
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STOCKHOLM (AP) — Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for a discovery that faced skepticism and mockery, even prompting his expulsion from his U.S. research team, before it won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough.
While doing research in the U.S. in 1982, Shechtman discovered a new chemical structure — quasicrystals — that researchers previously thought was impossible.
Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman poses for photographers during a news conference at the Haifa Technion, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011. Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals, a mosaic-like chemical structure that researchers previously thought was impossible. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
He was studying a mix of aluminum and manganese in an electron microscope when he found the atoms were arranged in a pattern — similar to one in some traditional Islamic mosaics — that never repeated itself and appeared contrary to the laws of nature.
He concluded that science was wrong — but it would take years for him and other researchers to prove that he was right.
Since then, quasicrystals have been produced in laboratories and a Swedish company found them in one of the most durable kinds of steel, which is now used in products such as razor blades and thin needles made specifically for eye surgery, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Quasicrystals are also being studied for use in new materials that convert heat to electricity. They were first discovered in nature in Russia in 2009.
Despite the initial reluctance in the scientific community to accept his discovery, it "fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter," the academy said in its citation for the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award.
"The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks," Shechtman, 70, told a news conference Wednesday at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.
Shechtman is a professor there and at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He will receive the award along with the other Nobel Prize winners at a Dec. 10 ceremony in Stockholm.
Israel has won 10 Nobel prizes, a source of great pride in the country of just 7.8 million people. Schechtman was congratulated by Israeli President Shimon Peres, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize as Israel's foreign minister in 1994, and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Every citizen of Israel is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud," Netanyahu said.
In chemical terms, a crystal is traditionally defined as a regular and repeating arrangement of atoms within a material. A quasicrystal presents a pattern that scientists had thought was impossible. The pattern of atoms within a material influences the material's physical properties.
"His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter," the academy said.
Nancy B. Jackson, president of the American Chemical Society called Shechtman's discovery "one of these great scientific discoveries that go against the rules." When Shechtman announced it, other experts hesitated.
"People didn't think that this kind of crystal existed," she said. "They thought it was against the rules of nature."
Only later did some scientists go back to some of their own inexplicable findings and realized they had seen quasicrystals but not realized what they had, Jackson said.
Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy said Shechtman's discovery was one of the few Nobel Prize-winning achievements that can be dated to a single day.
Crystallographers always believed that all crystals have rotational symmetry, so that when they are rotated, they look the same. On April 8, 1982, while on a sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and Technology in Washington, D.C., Shechtman first observed crystals with 10 points — pentagonal symmetry, which most scientists said was impossible.
"I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me," Shechtman said in a description of his work released by his university.
For months he tried to persuade his colleagues of his find, but they refused to accept it. Finally he was asked to leave his research group, and moved to another one within the institute.
Shechtman returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected, but finally published in November 1984 — to uproar in the scientific world. Double Nobel winner Linus Pauling was among those who never accepted the findings.
"He would stand on those platforms and declare, 'Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.'" Shechtman said.
In 1987, friends of Shechtman in France and Japan succeeded in growing crystals large enough for x-rays to repeat and verify what he had discovered with the electron microscope.
"It borders on art," academy member Sara Snogerup Linse said of the quasicrystal patterns. "Humans have created similar patterns in macroscopic scale with the help of ceramic tiles, quilts, etc. But what was new was that it was found also in the world of molecules and atoms."
Cesar Pay Gomez, a structural chemistry expert at Uppsala University in Sweden and an adviser to the prize committee, said research on quasicrystals is ongoing "in the field of thermal-electric applications, where waste heat can be converted to electrical currents or energy."
The Nobel Prize in chemistry announcement capped this year's science awards.
Immune system researchers Bruce Beutler of the U.S. and Frenchman Jules Hoffmann shared the medicine prize Monday with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, who died three days before the announcement. U.S.-born scientists Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess won the physics prize on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.
The Nobel Prizes are handed out every year on Dec. 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
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STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for overturning a fundamental assumption in their field by showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating. Their discovery created a new portrait of the eventual fate of the universe: a place of super-low temperatures and black skies unbroken by the light of galaxies moving away from each other at incredible speed.
Nobel Prizes winner for physics Saul Perlmutter smiles as he poses with his daughter's telescope at his home in Berkeley, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011 after hearing he had won. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said American Perlmutter would share the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award with U.S.-Australian Brian Schmidt and U.S. scientist Adam Riess. Working in two separate research teams during the 1990s, Perlmutter in one and Schmidt and Riess in the other, the scientists raced to map the universe's expansion by analyzing a particular type of supernovas, or exploding stars. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
Physicists had assumed for decades that the expansion of the universe was getting ever-slower, meaning that in billions of years it would resemble today's universe in many important ways. Then, working in separate research teams during the 1990s, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess found that the light from more than 50 distant exploding stars was far weaker than they expected, meaning that galaxies had to be racing away from each other at increasing speed. The acceleration is driven by what scientists call dark energy, a cosmic force that is one of the great mysteries of the universe.
The Nobel-winning discovery implies instead that the universe will get increasingly colder as matter spreads across ever-vaster distances in space, said Lars Bergstrom, secretary of the Nobel physics committee. He said galaxies that are 3 million light years away from Earth move at a speed of around 44 miles per second (70 kilometers per second). Galaxies that are 6 million light years away move twice as fast.
The research implies that billions of years from now, the universe will become "a very, very large, but very cold and lonely place," said Charles Blue, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics.
In contrast to the big bang, that fate has been called the "big rip" to indicate how galaxies would be torn apart, he said. Galaxies will be flying away so quickly that their light could not travel across the universe to distant observers as it does today, making the sky appear black, he said. "For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the citation said. "However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice."
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Perlmutter would receive half of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award, with Riess and Schmidt, a U.S.-born Australian, splitting the other half. Perlmutter, 52, heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley. Schmidt, 44, is the head of the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia. Riess, 41, is an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
Schmidt said he was just sitting down to have dinner with his family in Canberra, Australia, when the phone call came from the academy. "I was somewhat suspicious when the Swedish voice came on," Schmidt told The Associated Press.
"My knees sort of went weak and I had to walk around and sort my senses out." Riess said his "jaw dropped" when he received an early-morning call at his home in Baltimore from a bunch of Swedish men and realized "it wasn't Ikea," the Swedish furniture retailer. "I'm dazed," he told AP. The discovery was "the biggest shakeup in physics, in my opinion, in the last 30 years," said Phillip Schewe, a physicist and spokesman at the Joint Quantum Institute, which is operated by the University of Maryland and the federal government.
"I remember everyone thinking at the time (that) there was some mistake," Schewe said. But there was no mistake, and in fact the basic finding was confirmed later by other measurements. For example, other scientists found evidence for it when they analyzed the microwave radiation left over from the big bang that still bathes the universe, he said.
Perlmutter told AP his team made the discovery in steps, analyzing the data and assuming it was wrong. "And after months, you finally believe it," he said. "It's not quite a surprise anymore. I tell people it's the longest "aha!" experience that you've ever had." Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, said the prize confirmed an idea from Albert Einstein, called the cosmological constant, that Einstein inserted in his general theory of relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics.
Einstein later repudiated that idea as his "biggest blunder," but it did lead to a lot of theoretical and experimental studies, Dylla said. The physics prize was the second Nobel to be announced this year. On Monday the medicine prize went to American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann who shared it with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman for their discoveries about the immune system.
Steinman died three days before the announcement but since his death was not known to the committee, they decided he should keep the Nobel. Since 1974, Nobels have been awarded only to living scientists. The Nobel Prizes were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and have been handed out since 1901.
Last year's physics award went to Russian-born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for groundbreaking experiments with graphene, the strongest and thinnest material known to mankind. The prizes are handed out every year on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
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