STOCKHOLM:The Nobel Prize winners will be announced next week.
The awards are considered among the world’s most prestigious honors for achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics and peace.
The winners will join the pantheon of Nobel laureates, from Albert Einstein to Mother Teresa.
For the peace prize, US President Donald Trump has been nominated several times by people within the US as well as politicians abroad since 2018. His name also was put forth in December by a Republican congresswoman for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and some Arab states.
Here are some things to know about the Nobel Prizes:
A history of the Nobel Prizes
The Nobel Prizes were created by Alfred Nobel, a 19th-century businessman and chemist from Sweden. He held more than 300 patents, but his claim to fame before the prizes was having invented dynamite by mixing nitroglycerine with a compound that made the explosive more stable.
Dynamite — which became popular in construction, mining and the weapons industry — made Nobel a very rich man. Toward the end of his life he decided to use his vast fortune to fund annual prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
The first Nobel Prizes — in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace — were presented in 1901, five years after his death. In 1968, a sixth prize was created, for economics, by Sweden’s central bank. Though Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel, it’s always presented together with the others.
The Nobel nomination process
None of the nominations are announced by the prizes’ respective committees, and the Nobel statutes prohibit the judges from discussing their deliberations for 50 years. But those doing the nominating may choose to make their recommendations public.
A person cannot nominate themselves, though they can be nominated multiple times by others — including members of each prize’s panel.
Each prize’s committee operates slightly differently, but they all strive to honor Nobel’s wish that the winners have conferred benefit to humankind.
The peace prize committee is the only one that regularly rewards achievements made in the previous year — and the prize is the only one awarded in Oslo, Norway. For the science prizes, awarded in Stockholm, winners often have to wait decades to have their work recognized by the Nobel judges, who want to make sure that any breakthrough stands the test of time.
The program for this year’s Nobels
The 2025 Nobel Prize announcements kick off Monday with the medicine prize being announced by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 13.
The awards will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. Each prize carries an award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million), and the winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma. Up to three laureates for each award can share the prize money.
The Nobel Prize winners will be announced next week. What to know about the prestigious awards
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The Nobel Prize winners will be announced next week. What to know about the prestigious awards
- The winners will join the pantheon of Nobel laureates, from Albert Einstein to Mother Teresa
Judge declares 4 men wrongly accused of 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent
- The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families
- Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999
TEXAS, USA: A Texas judge on Thursday declared four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent, formally clearing their names in a courtroom for the first time since the killings of four teenage girls that haunted the city for decades.
“You are innocent,” state District Judge Dayna Blazey said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom.
The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators’ inability to solve it for decades. Blazey called her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.
“Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
A declaration of “actual innocence” would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.
“All four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,” Strassburger said.
The murders shocked Austin and confounded investigators for years
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
“Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.
Connection to a new suspect revealed
The case effectively went cold until 2025. It got new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.
Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers’ other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
