This year's Nobel Prize season approaches as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has shattered decades of almost uninterrupted peace in Europe and raised the risks of a nuclear disaster.
The secretive Nobel committees never hint who will win the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics or peace. It's anyone's guess who might win the awards being announced starting Monday.
Yet there's no lack of urgent causes deserving the attention that comes with winning the world's most prestigious prize: Wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia, disruptions to supplies of energy and food, rising inequality, the climate crisis, the ongoing fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The science prizes reward complex achievements beyond the understanding of most. But the recipients of the prizes in peace and literature are often known by a global audience and the choices — or perceived omissions — have sometimes stirred emotional reactions.
Members of the European Parliament have called for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine to be recognized this year by the Nobel Peace Prize committee for their resistance to the Russian invasion.
While that desire is understandable, that choice is unlikely because the Nobel committee has a history of honoring figures who end conflicts, not wartime leaders, said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Smith believes more likely peace prize candidates would be groups or individuals fighting climate change or the International Atomic Energy Agency, a past recipient.
Honoring the IAEA again would recognize its efforts to prevent a radioactive catastrophe at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia atomic power plant at the heart of fighting in Ukraine, and its work in fighting nuclear proliferation, Smith said.
“This is really difficult period in world history and there is not a lot of peace being made,” he said.
Promoting peace isn't always rewarded with a Nobel. India's Mohandas Gandhi, a prominent symbol of non-violence in the 20th century, was never so honored.
But former President Barack Obama was in 2009, sparking criticism from those who said he had not been president long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.
In some cases, the winners have not lived out the values enshrined in the peace prize.
Just this week the Vatican acknowledged imposing disciplinary sanctions on Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo following allegations he sexually abused boys in East Timor in the 1990s.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won in 2019 for making peace with neighboring Eritrea. A year later a largely ethnic conflict erupted in the country's Tigray region. Some accuse Abiy of stoking the tensions, which have resulted in widespread atrocities. Critics have called for his Nobel to be revoked and the Nobel committee has issued a rare admonition to him.
The Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi won the peace prize in 1991 while being under house arrest for her opposition to military rule. Decades later, she was seen as failing in a leadership role to stop atrocities committed by the military against the country's mostly Muslim Rohingya minority.
The Nobel committee has sometimes not awarded a peace prize at all. It paused them during World War I, except to honor the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1917. It didn't hand out any from 1939 to 1943 due to World War II. In 1948, the year Gandhi died, the Norwegian Nobel Committee made no award, citing a lack of a suitable living candidate.
The peace prize also does not always confer protection.
Last year journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia were awarded “for their courageous fight for freedom of expression” in the face of authoritarian governments.
Following the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has cracked down even harder on independent media, including Muratov's Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most renowned independent newspaper. Muratov himself was attacked on a Russian train by an assailant who poured red paint over him, injuring his eyes.
The Philippines government this year ordered the shutdown of Ressa’s news organization, Rappler.
The literature prize, meanwhile, has been notoriously unpredictable.
Few had bet on last year’s winner, Zanzibar-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose books explore the personal and societal impacts of colonialism and migration.
Gurnah was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa, and the prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers. It is also male-dominated, with just 16 women among its 118 laureates.
The list of possible winners includes literary giants from around the world: Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Norway’s Jon Fosse, Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid and France’s Annie Ernaux.
A clear contender is Salman Rushdie, the India-born writer and free-speech advocate who spent years in hiding after Iran’s clerical rulers called for his death over his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses.” Rushdie, 75, was stabbed and seriously injured at a festival in New York state on Aug. 12.
The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. poet Louise Glück in 2020 have helped the literature prize move on from years of controversy and scandal.
In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.
Some scientists hope the award for physiology or medicine honors colleagues instrumental in the development of the mRNA technology that went into COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives across the world.
“When we think of Nobel prizes, we think of things that are paradigm shifting, and in a way I see mRNA vaccines and their success with COVID-19 as a turning point for us,” said Deborah Fuller, a microbiology professor at the University of Washington.
The Nobel Prize announcements this year kick off Monday with the prize in physiology or medicine, followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Oct. 7 and the economics award on Oct. 10.
The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor ($880,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10.
Nobel Prize season arrives amid war, nuclear fears, hunger
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Nobel Prize season arrives amid war, nuclear fears, hunger
Afghan refugee convicted in murder case that shocked Albuquerque Muslim community
- Muhammad Syed faces life in prison for killing Aftab Hussein in 2022
- Syed also will stand trial in the coming months for two other slayings
Trump says Jews who vote for Democrats ‘hate Israel’ and their religion
- Trump: “They should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed”
NEW YORK: Former President Donald Trump on Monday charged that Jews who vote for Democrats “hate Israel” and hate “their religion,” igniting a firestorm of criticism from the White House and Jewish leaders.
Trump, in an interview, had been asked about Democrats’ growing criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his handling of the war in Gaza as the civilian death toll continues to mount.
“I actually think they hate Israel,” Trump responded to his former aide, Sebastian Gorka. “I think they hate Israel. And the Democrat party hates Israel.”
Trump, who last week became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, went on to charge: “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”
The comments sparked immediate backlash from the White House, President Joe Biden’s campaign and Jewish leaders. The vast majority of Jewish Americans identify as Democrats, but Trump has often accused them of disloyalty, perpetuating what critics say is an antisemitic trope.
At the White House, spokesperson Andrew Bates cast the comments as “vile and unhinged Antisemitic rhetoric” without mentioning Trump by name.
“As Antisemitic crimes and acts of hate have increased across the world — among them the deadliest attack committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust — leaders have an obligation to call hate what it is and bring Americans together against it,” he said. “There is no justification for spreading toxic, false stereotypes that threaten fellow citizens. None.”
Biden’s campaign said, “The only person who should be ashamed here is Donald Trump.”
“Trump is going to lose again this November because Americans are sick of his hateful resentment, personal attacks, and extreme agenda,” said spokesman James Singer.
Jonathan Greenblatt, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, said, “Accusing Jews of hating their religion because they might vote for a particular party is defamatory & patently false.”
“Serious leaders who care about the historic US-Israel alliance should focus on strengthening, rather than unraveling, bipartisan support for the State of Israel,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Trump’s comments come as Biden has been facing mounting pressure from the progressive wing of his party over his administration’s support for Israel in its retaliatory offensive in Gaza. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.
While Biden continues to back Israel’s right to defend itself, he has increasingly criticized Netanyahu. After his State of the Union speech, he said he needed to have a “come to Jesus” conversation with the Israeli leader. He has also accused Netanyahu of “hurting Israel more than helping Israel,” saying, “he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.”
Trump took particular issue with recent comments from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the country’s highest-ranking Jewish official. In a speech last week, Schumer sharply criticized Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza, warning that the civilian toll was damaging Israel’s standing around the world. He also called for Israel to hold new elections.
While the White House formally distanced itself from Schumer’s comments, the Democratic leader and key ally was voicing an opinion increasingly held across Biden’s administration.
Schumer — whom Trump accused of being “very anti-Israel now” — responded by accusing Trump of “making highly partisan and hateful rants.”
“To make Israel a partisan issue only hurts Israel and the US-Israeli relationship,” he wrote on X.
The Pew Research Center reported in 2021 that Jews are “among the most consistently liberal and Democratic groups in the US,” with 7 in 10 Jewish adults identifying with or leaning toward the Democratic Party. In 2020, it found that nearly three-quarters of American Jews disapproved of Trump’s performance as president, with just 27 percent rating him positively.
Americans have also increasingly soured on Israel’s military operation in Gaza, according to surveys from The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. In January, 50 percent of US adults said the military response from Israel in the Gaza Strip had gone too far, up from 40 percent in November.
That number was higher among Democrats, 6 in 10 of whom said the same thing in both surveys.
UN chief warns against ‘sequel to ‘Oppenheimer“
- Israel, the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed power albeit an undeclared one, has been at war since an October 7 attack by Hamas militants
UNITED NATIONS, United States: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres invoked Oscar-winning film “Oppenheimer” on Monday as he warned that the world faced the highest risk of nuclear war in decades.
At a Security Council session called by Japan, Guterres said that the biopic about the morally conflicted father of the atomic bomb “brought the harsh reality of nuclear doomsday to vivid life for millions around the world.”
“Humanity cannot survive a sequel to Oppenheimer,” Guterres said.
“We meet at a time when geopolitical tensions and mistrust have escalated the risk of nuclear warfare to its highest point in decades,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons as he warns the West against its support for Ukraine, which Moscow invaded more than two years ago.
Without naming Putin, Guterres said, “Nuclear saber-rattling must stop.”
“Threats to use nuclear weapons in any capacity are unacceptable,” he said.
Elsewhere in the world, tensions surrounding nuclear-armed North Korea have continued to rise and Iran has been enriching uranium closer to the level needed if it decides to build an atom bomb.
Israel, the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed power albeit an undeclared one, has been at war since an October 7 attack by Hamas militants.
Guterres called on the United States and Russia to resume negotiations, at a standstill since the Ukraine war, on a successor to the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty which expires in early 2026.
He also called for progress on other initiatives including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in 2021 but has little practical effect as no nuclear-weapons states are party to it.
“Investments in the tools of war are outstripping investments in the tools of peace. Arms budgets are growing, while diplomacy and development budgets are shrinking,” Guterres said.
The United States, the only country to have used nuclear weapons in warfare, said it would work on one area with ally Japan, whose cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by atomic weapons in 1945.
The United States as well as France said they would join Japan in a coalition to push through the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, which would ban production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the key ingredients in nuclear weapons.
Most nuclear states have already stopped production. Discussions on a treaty have been blocked by Pakistan, which believes it would fall behind rival India and which enjoys diplomatic support from China.
“To forestall a potential arms race, we need to see an end to the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons, and continue pursuing negotiations on a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty,” said the US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa, who led the meeting, vowed that Tokyo “will further increase international and political attention” toward the treaty.
Kamikawa also called for work to ensure that nuclear weapons are not placed in space.
The United States said last month that Russia was developing a system to send nuclear weapons to space, an assertion denied by Putin.
“During the Cold War, despite the confrontational environment at that time, the international community established legal frameworks to ensure the peaceful and sustainable use of outer space, which prohibit placing nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction in outer space,” Kamikawa said.
“Even now, Japan firmly believes that outer space must remain a domain free of nuclear weapons,” she said.
An Afghan refugee has been convicted of murder in a case that shocked Albuquerque’s Muslim community
An Afghan refugee has been convicted of murder in a case that shocked Albuquerque’s Muslim community
- Syed, who speaks Pashto and required the help of translators throughout the trial, settled in the US with his family several years before the killings
- Defense attorneys said the conviction would be appealed once the other two trials are complete
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.: An Afghan refugee was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder in one of three fatal shootings that shook Albuquerque’s Muslim community during the summer of 2022.
Muhammad Syed faces life in prison for killing 41-year-old Aftab Hussein on July 26, 2022. He also will stand trial in the coming months in the other two slayings.
During the trial, prosecutors presented cellphone data that showed his phone was in the area when the shooting occurred, and a ballistics expert testified that casings and projectiles recovered from the scene had been fired from a rifle that was found hidden under Syed’s bed.
Defense attorneys argued that prosecutors had no evidence that Syed was the one who pulled the trigger. They said others who lived in his home could also access his phone, the vehicle and the rifle.
The defense called no witnesses; Syed tearfully declined to testify in his own defense.
Prosecutors on Monday said they were pleased that jurors agreed it was a deliberate killing. However, they acknowledged that no testimony during the weeklong trial nor any court filings addressed a possible motive or detailed any interactions that Syed might have had with Hussein before the killing.
“We were not able to uncover anything that we would indicate would be a motive that would explain this,” Deputy District Attorney David Waymire said outside the courthouse. “As best we can tell, this could be a case of a serial killer where there’s a motive known only to them and not something that we can really understand.”
Defense attorneys said the conviction would be appealed once the other two trials are complete. They too said a motive has yet to be uncovered.
The three ambush-style killings happened over the course of several days, leaving authorities scrambling to determine if race or religion might have been behind the crimes. It was not long before the investigation shifted away from possible hate crimes to what prosecutors described to jurors as the “willful and very deliberate” actions of another member of the Muslim community.
Syed, who speaks Pashto and required the help of translators throughout the trial, settled in the US with his family several years before the killings. Prosecutors described him during previous court hearings as having a violent history. His public defenders argued that previous allegations of domestic violence never resulted in convictions.
Syed also is accused of killing Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, a 27-year-old urban planner who was gunned down Aug. 1, 2022, while taking his evening walk, and Naeem Hussain, who was shot four days later as he sat in his vehicle outside a refugee resettlement agency on the city’s south side.
Muhammad Afzaal Hussain’s older brother, Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain, was there Monday to hear the verdict. He has been following the cases closely and like others in the community is troubled that there’s still no answer as to why his brother and the others were targeted.
A student leader at the University of New Mexico who was active in politics and later worked for the city of Española, Muhammad Afzaal Hussain had a bright future, his brother said. They had come to the United States from Pakistan for educational and economic opportunities.
He said the life they had planned was just starting to come to fruition when his brother was killed.
“It was a big loss,” he said.
Police also identified Syed as the suspect in the killing of another Muslim man in 2021, but no charges have been filed in that case.
Authorities issued a public plea for help following the third killing in the summer of 2022. They shared photographs of a vehicle believed to be involved in the crimes, resulting in tips that led to Syed.
Syed denied involvement in the killings after being stopped more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Albuquerque. He told authorities he was on his way to Texas to find a new home for his family, saying he was concerned about the killings in Albuquerque.
The judge prohibited prosecutors from directly introducing as evidence statements Syed made to a detective while being questioned. Defense attorneys argued that Syed’s rights were violated because the detective, through an interpreter, did not adequately inform Syed of his right to a court-appointed attorney.
During the trial, prosecutors gave jurors a rundown of what happened the night of the first killing: Hussein parked at his apartment complex at around 10 p.m. and had just stepped out of his vehicle with his keys still in his hand when gunfire erupted.
“He stood no chance,” prosecutor Jordan Machin said during closing arguments. Machin said Syed had been lying in wait and that he continued to shoot even as Hussein lay on the ground.
Officers found Hussein with multiple wounds that stretched from his neck down to his feet. Investigators testified that some of the high-caliber rounds went through his body and pierced the car.
Prosecutors showed photos of Hussein’s bullet-riddled car and said the victim was killed nearly instantly.
To have peace, Europe must prepare for war, EU council president says
- Michel urged EU countries to ensure Ukraine received what it needed on the battlefield — including by spending EU money on military equipment, and using windfall profits from Russia’s immobilized assets to purchase arms for Ukraine
BRUSSELS: Europe must strengthen its defense capabilities and shift to a “war economy” mode in response to the threat posed by Russia, European Council President Charles Michel said on Monday.
In an op-ed published in European newspapers and the Euractiv website, Michel — who will chair a meeting of EU leaders on Thursday to discuss support for Ukraine — said Europe needed to take responsibility for its own security and not rely heavily on the support of countries such as the US
“If we do not get the EU’s response right and do not give Ukraine enough support to stop Russia, we are next. We must therefore be defense-ready and shift to a ‘war economy’ mode,” Michel said.
“If we want peace, we must prepare for war,” he said.
Michel said while Europe had made strides since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — including by increasing military manufacturing capacity by 50 percent — far more was needed and, for decades, Europe had not invested enough in its security and defense.
Michel urged EU countries to ensure Ukraine received what it needed on the battlefield — including by spending EU money on military equipment, and using windfall profits from Russia’s immobilized assets to purchase arms for Ukraine.
He urged countries to facilitate investments in defense — including by considering changing the mandate of the EU lending arm, the European Investment Bank, to allow it to support Europe’s defense industry.
EU countries approved an agreement on Monday to increase the EU’s support for Ukraine’s armed forces by 5 billion euros ($5.4 billion) — amid warnings that Kyiv’s forces need more resources to hold the line against a larger Russian army as a $60 billion US aid package for Ukraine is being held up by Congress.