Nobel Committee

The Norwegian awards committee knows who will win the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize, but in keeping with a tradition of secrecy, the panel will say nothing until Oct. 16, an official said Friday. The Oslo-based committee sifted through a record 139 nominations this year, including 114 individuals and 25 organizations. Geir Lundestad, the committee's nonvoting secretary, said a decision has been made, but, as usual, Lundestad would not give the slightest hint. "We have reached a conclusion.

Dr. Ralph M. Steinman was a creative and dogged researcher who spent years convincing a doubting scientific community that he had found cells that were key to the working of the immune system. Diagnosed in 2007 with pancreatic cancer, which usually kills within months, he decided to try to fight back with a therapy based on his own discoveries decades earlier. On Friday, he succumbed to the disease at age 68. On Monday, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, unaware that he had died.

President Reagan is among 99 nominees for the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, the awards committee said today. The Nobel committee never reveals the reasons given for the nominations or the names of the nominators.

In 1936, German journalist Carl von Ossietzky was under heavy pressure from the Nazis to turn down the Nobel Peace Prize; Hitler and his cronies saw the award as a slap in the face to the regime because Ossietzky had dedicated his career to exposing German rearmament and militarism. He rejected the government's contention that he was essentially excommunicating himself from German society by accepting the award, writing a letter from his hospital bed (where he was confined as a result of tuberculosis and the torture he had endured in prison)

Hurray to the Nobel committee for finally recognizing Arab literature and for choosing Naguib Mahfouz for this year's prize. It's about time the West pays attention to the Arab literature. The committee could not have picked anyone better. KHADER KHALIL HASSAN Hemet

Re "Obama awarded Nobel Peace Prize for diplomacy," Web article, Oct. 9 I support President Obama as much as anyone, but let's face it, what the Nobel committee really did was award the prize to the American people for electing Obama. Obama's great accomplishment in the eyes of the committee? Not being George W. Bush. Richard Murphy Whittier :: Congratulations to Obama for your vision, perseverance and communication skills to get the important message to the world that the U.S. is morally back.

Philippine President Corazon Aquino and missing British hostage negotiator Terry Waite are among 84 nominees for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Wednesday. Committee Secretary Jakob Sverdrup would only confirm the names of Aquino and Waite on a secret list of 56 individuals and 28 organizations he said were proposed for the prestigious award this year.

Your article seems to imply that the Nobel Committee didn't award the peace prize to Reagan because it didn't want to influence the outcome of the presidential elections. My guess is that what was more immediately on their minds was the fact that Reagan and his appointees have spent the last eight years manufacturing a war in Central American that has cost thousands of lives. I would hardly think that qualifies him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm glad the committee decided to present this award to a group of people who are sincerely dedicated to the cause of world peace, even if it means risking their own lives--and even when it may not advance their own personal political agenda.

South Africa barred the Dalai Lama from a peace conference in Johannesburg this week, hoping to keep good relations with trading partner China but instead generating a storm of criticism. Friday's peace conference was organized by South African soccer officials to highlight the first World Cup to be held in Africa, which South Africa will host in 2010. But because the Dalai Lama isn't being allowed to attend, it is now being boycotted by fellow Nobel Peace Prize winners retired Cape Town Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former President F.W. de Klerk, as well as members of the Nobel Committee.

Eligibility: A prospective Nobel candidate must be an institution, individual or association, have a published body of work, and be alive. Posthumous prizes are awarded only to announced winners who die before the Dec. 10 awards ceremony. Nominations: Must be made in writing, by individuals, and received by Feb. 1 of an award year. Candidates may be nominated by: Previous laureates within a field. Professors, from specified institutions or by invitation.

Ninety-one Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded since 1901. On Friday, at the Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, there will be an empty chair. This year's recipient, Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and dissident currently serving 11 years in prison for supporting the pro-democracy and human rights manifesto Charter 08, will not be here to receive the honor. Nor will his wife or any other relatives or close friends, as they have been placed under house arrest or police surveillance, or barred from traveling abroad.

Norway and China are at odds over a case that involves blood, passion and a fundamental concern about human rights, but this time it's not about the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, it is a garden-variety homicide, a young woman ? in this case Norwegian ? killed in Hungary, allegedly by her jilted lover, a Chinese student. When it was learned this month that Chinese officials had freed the suspect, despite an apparent confession, many Norwegians saw the move as a blatant act of retaliation by China for the Oslo-based Nobel committee having awarded its annual peace prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Jose Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in literature for early novels that explored historical themes from unconventional angles and later works in which inexplicable events threaten society's underpinnings, has died. He was 87. The writer died Friday at his home in Lanzarote, one of Spain's Canary Islands, of multiple organ failure after a long illness, the Jose Saramago Foundation said. Saramago, the only Portuguese winner of the literary prize, was 60 before he wrote most of the novels for which he was honored, having worked as a car mechanic, civil servant, production manager in a publishing company and newspaper editor before becoming a full-time writer.

President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize here today, acknowledging the irony of winning it as a wartime president and calling his own accomplishments "slight" in comparison to past winners. But in his speech to the Nobel Committee, Obama spoke of the concept of a "just war" and the pursuit of a "just peace," which he said sometimes depends on more than simply refraining from violence. Lauding the commitment of past Nobel laureates to nonviolence, Obama said that -- as a head of state and commander-in-chief of a military at war, sworn to protect and defend his nation -- he cannot follow their examples alone.

A full plate of turkeys With apologies to cranberry sauce and corn bread stuffing, there's nothing better than letters to the editor to remind us that there are turkeys -- bad ideas -- in our midst. This year, readers lambasted pay cuts for government workers and payouts to automakers and banks. They railed against President Obama's choice of dog as passionately as they ridiculed his choice of Cabinet secretaries. In honor of (and with sincere thanks to) the outraged letter writers who fill this space each day, today's page serves up a heaping portion of some of 2009's biggest turkeys, per our readers, with just the right amount of salt and spice.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee validated President Obama's standing as an international superstar who has transformed America's image around the world. Obama may now spend the rest of his administration trying to turn the lofty ideals that brought him the prize into concrete results on the many intractable problems still before him. From every direction there was surprise that a president still in his first year in office with no major accomplishments internationally, save for the change in public opinion, would receive the prestigious award.

Iran's first Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, has exposed the battle lines between the nation's conservatives and reformists, who exchanged fire in Saturday's newspapers. Iran's conservatives accused the Nobel committee of pandering to the West's political agenda by awarding its Peace Prize to Ebadi, while reformists hailed her as a catalyst for change. Ebadi, 56, is a thorn in the side of hard-liners and a vocal campaigner on behalf of women's rights.

Re "Obama awarded Nobel Peace Prize for diplomacy," Web article, Oct. 9 I support President Obama as much as anyone, but let's face it, what the Nobel committee really did was award the prize to the American people for electing Obama. Obama's great accomplishment in the eyes of the committee? Not being George W. Bush. Richard Murphy Whittier :: Congratulations to Obama for your vision, perseverance and communication skills to get the important message to the world that the U.S. is morally back.

President Obama, who has pledged to place diplomacy ahead of confrontation in world affairs, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a remarkable and controversial honor for a leader just nine months in office. The award committee cited Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," and said that he had given the world "hope for a better future." The committee commended Obama's push for nuclear disarmament, his outreach to the Muslim world and his turn from the unilateralism that guided George W. Bush, although the former president was not named.