Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi win Nobel peace prize 2014
Pakistani teenager and Indian children’s rights activist beat Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, the Pope and Vladimir Putin to the prestigious prize
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage education campaigner shot on school bus in 2012 by a Taliban gunman, has won the 2014 Nobel peace prize.
Malala won along with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children’s rights activist.
The two were named winner of the £690,000 (8m kronor or $1.11m) prize by the chairman of the Nobel committee - Norway’s former prime minister Thorbjoern Jagland - on Friday morning.
Malala, now 17, is a schoolgirl and education campaigner who was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman two years ago in her home country of Pakistan. She won for what the Nobel committee called her “heroic struggle” for girls’ right to an education.
She is the youngest ever winner of the prize.
After being shot she was airlifted to Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, where she was treated for life-threatening injuries.
In a statement, the committee said: “Despite her youth, Malala Yousafzai has already fought for several years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations.
“This she has done under the most dangerous circumstances. Through her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls’ rights to education.”
Satyarthi, the Nobel committee said, had maintained the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and headed various forms of peaceful protests, “focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain”.
There were a record 278 nominations this year, 19 more than ever before – including US whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Pope Francis. Also on the list of nominees was an anti-war clause in the Japanese constitution and the International Space Station Partnership.
Previous choices include illustrious names such as Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Martin Luther King - and, controversially, Barack Obama in 2009.
Last year’s choice of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in hindsight seems a similar act of wishful thinking. At the time the agency’s role in overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal offered a very slim chance of finding a diplomatic resolution to the crisis in that country. But the violence in Syria has only got worse, and there are continuing concerns that the Assad regime has continued to conceal its stockpile of chemical weapons.
The Nobel announcements have been going on all week, and willconclude with the prize for economics on Monday.
Yesterday the Nobel committee stunned the literary world by choosing little-known French author Patrick Modiano for the prize.
On Wednesday Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, William Moerner of Stanford University in California, and Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia won the chemistry prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.
On Tuesday Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, shared the physics prize with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”.
And on Monday, British-US scientist John O’Keefe and married couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser from Norway won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering the brain’s “inner GPS”.
Worth 8m kronor each, the Nobel prizes are always handed out on 10 December, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Besides the prize money, each laureate receives a diploma and a gold medal.
Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, provided few directions for how to select winners, except that the prize committees should reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/10/wins-nobel-peace-prize-2014
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