ReportWire

Tag: Nobel Prizes

  • Pioneers in artificial intelligence win the Nobel Prize in physics

    Pioneers in artificial intelligence win the Nobel Prize in physics

    [ad_1]

    STOCKHOLM — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.

    Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

    “These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. “They … did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

    The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — that they pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation,” said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

    Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton’s, told The Associated Press Tuesday, “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had.”

    Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

    “It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

    “Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.

    “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

    The Nobel committee also mentioned fears about the possible flipside.

    Moons said that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

    Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

    “I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton said.

    For his part, Hopfield, who signed early petitions by researchers calling for strong control of the technology, compared the risks and benefits of machine-learning to work on viruses and nuclear energy, capable of helping and harming society.

    Neither winner was home when they received the news. Hopfield, who was staying with his wife at a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after grabbing coffee and getting his flu shot, he opened his computer to a flurry of activity.

    “I’ve never seen that many emails in my life,” he said. A bottle of champagne and bowl of soup are waiting on his desk for him, but he doubts there are any fellow physicists in town to join in the celebration.

    On Tuesday, Hinton said he was shocked at the honor.

    “I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone. He said he was at a cheap hotel with no internet.

    Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn” by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns from a teacher, with an initial solution graded and flaws identified and returned to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.

    His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.

    Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

    “For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told The Associated Press in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on.”

    “My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly.”

    And Hinton himself uses machine learning in his daily life, he said.

    “Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it’s a not very good expert. And that’s very useful.”

    Speaking to the AP earlier this year, he said: “Twenty years ago, I think people would have … agreed that systems with the ability of GPT-4 or (Google’s) Gemini had achieved general intelligence comparable to that of humans. Being able to answer more or less any question in a sensible way would have passed the test. But now that AI can do that, people want to change the test.”

    Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

    “What fascinates me most is still this question of how mind comes from machine,” Hopfield said in a video posted online by The Franklin Institute after it awarded him a physics prize in 2019.

    Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.

    Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

    The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

    Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands and Borenstein reported from Washington. Associated Press reporter Adithi Ramakrishnan contributed from New York and reporter Matt O’Brien contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel Prize in physics awarded to two scientists for machine learning discoveries

    Nobel Prize in physics awarded to two scientists for machine learning discoveries

    [ad_1]

    STOCKHOLM — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.

    Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

    “This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel committee said in a press release.

    Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

    She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”

    Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

    “It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in the open call with reporters and the officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

    “Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

    The Nobel committee that honored the science behind machine learning and AI also mentioned fears about its possible flipside. Moon said that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

    Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

    On Tuesday, he said he was shocked at the honor.

    “I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone.

    Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”

    His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.

    Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

    “For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told The Associated Press in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on. My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly.”

    Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said. Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data.

    Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

    The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

    Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Associated Press reporter Matt O’Brien contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel Prize in medicine honors two Americans for discovery of microRNA

    Nobel Prize in medicine honors two Americans for discovery of microRNA

    [ad_1]

    STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.

    The Nobel Assembly said that their discovery is “proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.”

    Ambros performed the research that led to his prize at Harvard University. He is currently a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ruvkun’s research was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, where he’s a professor of genetics, said Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee.

    Perlmann said he spoke to Ruvkun by phone shortly before the announcement.

    “It took a long time before he came to the phone and sounded very tired, but he quite rapidly, was quite excited and happy, when he understood what, it was all about,” Perlmann said.

    Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic.

    The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

    The announcement launched this year’s Nobel prizes award season.

    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. 14.

    The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Nobel Prizes will be announced against a backdrop of wars, famine and artificial intelligence

    The Nobel Prizes will be announced against a backdrop of wars, famine and artificial intelligence

    [ad_1]

    STAVANGER, Norway — Wars, a refugee crisis, famine and artificial intelligence could all be recognized when Nobel Prize announcements begin next week under a shroud of violence.

    The prize week coincides with the Oct. 7 anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which began a year of bloodshed and war across the Middle East.

    The literature and science prizes could be immune. But the peace prize, which recognizes efforts to end conflict, will be awarded in an atmosphere of ratcheting international violence — if awarded at all.

    “I look at the world and see so much conflict, hostility and confrontation, I wonder if this is the year the Nobel Peace Prize should be withheld,” said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

    As well as events roiling the Middle East, Smith cites the war in Sudan and risk of famine there, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and his institute’s research showing that global military spending is increasing at its fastest pace since World War II.

    “It could go to some groups which are making heroic efforts but are marginalized,” Smith said. “But the trend is in the wrong direction. Perhaps it would be right to draw attention to that by withholding the peace prize this year.”

    Withholding the Nobel Peace is not new. It has been suspended 19 times in the past, including during the world wars. The last time it was not awarded was in 1972.

    However, Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, says withdrawal would be a mistake in 2024, saying the prize is “arguably more important as a way to promote and recognize important work for peace.”

    Civil grassroot groups, and international organizations with missions to mitigate violence in the Middle East could be recognized.

    Nominees are kept secret for 50 years, but nominators often publicize their picks. Academics at the Free University Amsterdam said they have nominated the Middle East-based organizations EcoPeace, Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun for peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.

    Urdal believes it’s possible the committee could consider the Sudan Emergency Response Rooms, a group of grassroots initiatives providing aid to stricken Sudanese facing famine and buffeted by the country’s brutal civil war.

    The announcements begin Monday with the physiology or medicine prize, followed on subsequent days by the physics, chemistry, literature and peace awards.

    The Peace Prize announcement will be made on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, while all the others will be announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The prize in economics will be announced the following week on Oct. 14.

    New technology, possibly artificial intelligence, could be recognized in one or more of the categories.

    Critics of AI warn the rise of autonomous weapons shows the new technology could mean additional peace-shattering misery for many people. Yet AI has also enabled scientific breakthroughs that are tipped for recognition in other categories.

    David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, says scientists from Google Deepmind, the AI lab, could be among those under consideration for the chemistry prize.

    The company’s artificial intelligence, AlphaFold, “accurately predicts the structure of proteins,” he said. It is already widely used in several fields, including medicine, where it could one day be used to develop a breakthrough drug.

    Pendlebury spearheads Clarivate’s list of scientists whose papers are among the world’s most cited, and whose work it says are ripe for Nobel recognition.

    “AI will increasingly be a part of the panoply of tools that researchers use,” Pendlebury said. He said he would be extremely surprised if a discovery “firmly anchored in AI” did not win Nobel prizes in the next 10 years.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Studies on pigeon-guided missiles, swimming abilities of dead fish among Ig Nobles winners

    Studies on pigeon-guided missiles, swimming abilities of dead fish among Ig Nobles winners

    [ad_1]

    BOSTON — BOSTON (AP) — A study that explores the feasibility of using pigeons to guide missiles and one that looks at the swimming abilities of dead fish were among the winners Thursday of this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for comical scientific achievement.

    Held less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced, the 34th annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine’s website to make people laugh and think. Winners received a transparent box containing historic items related to Murphy’s Law — the theme of the night — and a nearly worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill. Actual Nobel laureates handed the winners their prizes.

    “While some politicians were trying to make sensible things sound crazy, scientists discovered some crazy-sounding things that make a lot of sense,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, said in an e-mail interview.

    The ceremony started with Kees Moliker, winner of 2003 Ig Noble for biology, giving out safety instructions. His prize was for a study that documented the existence of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks.

    “This is the duck,” he said, holding up a duck. “This is the dead one.”

    After that, someone came on stage wearing a yellow target on their chest and a plastic face mask. Soon, they were inundated with people in the audience throwing paper airplanes at them.

    Then, the awards began — several dry presentations which were interrupted by a girl coming on stage and repeatedly yelling “Please stop. I’m bored.” The awards ceremony was also was broken up by an international song competition inspired by Murphy’s Law, including one about coleslaw and another about the legal system.

    The winners were honored in 10 categories, including for peace and anatomy. Among them were scientists who showed a vine from Chile imitates the shapes of artificial plants nearby and another study that examined whether the hair on people’s heads in the Northern Hemisphere swirled in the same direction as someone’s hair in the Southern Hemisphere.

    Other winners include a group of scientists who showed that fake medicine that causes side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that doesn’t cause side effects and one showing that some mammals are cable of breathing through their anus — winners who came on stage wearing a fish-inspired hats.

    Julie Skinner Vargas accepted the peace prize on behalf of her late father B.F. Skinner, who wrote the pigeon-missile study. Skinner Vargas is also the head of the B.F. Skinner Foundation.

    “I want to thank you for finally acknowledging his most important contribution,” she said. “Thank you for putting the record straight.”

    James Liao, a biology professor at the University of Florida, accepted the physics prize for his study demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

    “I discovered that a live fish moved more than a dead fish but not by much,” Liao said, holding up a fake fish. “A dead trout towed behind a stick also flaps its tail to the beat of the current like a live fish surfing on swirling eddies, recapturing the energy in its environment. A dead fish does live fish things.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Ig Nobel Awards Honor Studies On Pigeon-Guided Missiles, Swimming Abilities Of Dead Fish

    Ig Nobel Awards Honor Studies On Pigeon-Guided Missiles, Swimming Abilities Of Dead Fish

    [ad_1]

    BOSTON (AP) — A study that explores the feasibility of using pigeons to guide missiles and one that looks at the swimming abilities of dead fish were among the winners Thursday of this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for comical scientific achievement.

    Held less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced, the 34th annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine’s website to make people laugh and think. Along with handing out the awards, the audience makes and tosses paper airplanes.

    “While some politicians were trying to make sensible things sound crazy, scientists discovered some crazy-sounding things that make a lot of sense,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, said in an e-mail interview.

    The winners, honored in 10 categories, also included scientists who showed a vine from Chile imitates the shapes of artificial plants nearby and another study that examined whether the hair on people’s heads in the Northern Hemisphere swirled in the same direction as someone’s hair in the Southern Hemisphere.

    Other winners include a group of scientists who showed that fake medicine that causes side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that doesn’t cause side effects and one showing that some mammals are cable of breathing through their anus.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel laureate Yunus arrives in Bangladesh to take over as interim leader

    Nobel laureate Yunus arrives in Bangladesh to take over as interim leader

    [ad_1]

    DHAKA, Bangladesh — Bangladesh’s next leader Muhammad Yunus arrived home Thursday from an overseas trip and will take office later in the day, as he looks to restore calm and rebuild the country following an uprising that ended the 15-year, increasingly autocratic rule of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

    Yunus landed at Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport on Thursday afternoon and was welcomed by the country’s military chief, Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman, who was flanked by navy and air force heads.

    Some of the student leaders who led the uprising against Hasina were also present at the airport to welcome him. They had earlier proposed Yunus as interim leader to the country’s figurehead president, who is currently acting as the chief executive under the constitution.

    Security was tight at the airport to ensure Yunus’ safe arrival, as the country has experienced days of unrest following the downfall of Hasina on Monday. President Mohammed Shahabuddin will administer the oath-taking ceremony on Thursday night when Yunus is expected to announce his new Cabinet.

    Before leaving Paris, where he was attending the Olympics, Yunus appealed for calm in Bangladesh amid tensions over the country’s future.

    Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy, who acts as an adviser to his mother, vowed Wednesday that his family and the Awami League party would continue to be engaged in Bangladesh’s politics — a reversal from what he’d said earlier in the week after Hasina stepped down Monday and fled to India.

    Yunuswas named as interim leader following talks among military officials, civic leaders and the student activists who led the uprising against Hasina. Yunus made his first public comments in the French capital on Wednesday before boarding a plane to return home.

    Yunus congratulated the student protesters, saying they had made “our second Victory Day possible,” and he appealed to them and other stakeholders to remain peaceful, while condemning the violence that followed Hasina’s resignation.

    “Violence is our enemy. Please don’t create more enemies. Be calm and get ready to build the country,” Yunus said.

    Bangladesh’s military chief, Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman, said in a televised address on Wednesday that he expected Yunus to usher in a “beautiful democratic” process.

    Yunus, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work developing microcredit markets, told reporters in Paris: “I’m looking forward to going back home and seeing what’s happening there, and how we can organize ourselves to get out of the trouble that we are in.″

    Asked when elections would be held, he put his hands up as if to indicate it was too early to say.

    “I’ll go and talk to them. I’m just fresh in this whole area,” he said.

    A tribunal in Dhaka earlier on Wednesday acquitted Yunus in a labor law violation case involving a telecommunication company he founded, in which he was convicted and sentenced to six months in jail. He had been released on bail in the case.

    The president had dissolved Parliament on Tuesday, clearing the path for an interim administration that is expected to schedule new elections.

    Yunus has been a longtime opponent of Hasina, who had called him a “bloodsucker” allegedly for using force to extract loan repayments from rural poor, mainly women. Yunus has denied the allegations.

    In a span of weeks since July 15, more than 300 people died in violence in Bangladesh. Rising tensions in the days surrounding Hasina’s resignation created chaos, with police leaving their posts after being attacked. Dozens of officers were killed, prompting police to stop working across the country. They threatened not to return unless their safety is ensured. The looting of firearms was also reported in local media.

    The chaos began in July with protests against a quota system for government jobs that critics said favored people with connections to Hasina’s party. But the demonstrations soon grew into a broader challenge to Hasina’s 15-year rule, which was marked by human rights abuses, corruption, allegations of rigged elections and a brutal crackdown on her opponents.

    Joy, Hasina’s son, said in a social media post on Wednesday that his family would return to politics and not give up following attacks on the Awami League party’s leaders and members. Many see Joy as Hasina’s successor in a dynastic political culture that dominates the South Asian nation’s politics.

    On Monday, Joy had said Hasina would not return to politics after she stepped down. But in a video message posted on his Facebook page on Wednesday, he urged party activists to rise up.

    “You are not alone. We are here. The family of Bangabandhu has not gone anywhere,” he said.

    Hasina’s father, independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is fondly referred to in Bangladesh as Bangabandhu, which means “friend of Bengal.”

    “If we want to build a new Bangladesh, it is not possible without the Awami League,” he said.

    “The Awami League is the oldest, democratic, and largest party in Bangladesh,” Joy added. “The Awami League has not died … It is not possible to eliminate the Awami League. We had said that our family would not engage in politics anymore. However, given the attacks on our leaders and activists, we cannot give up.”

    Overnight into Thursday, residents across Dhaka carried sticks, iron rods and sharp weapons to guard their neighborhoods amid reports of robberies. Communities used loudspeakers in mosques to alert people that robberies were occurring, as police remained off duty. The military shared hotline numbers for people seeking help.

    The quick move to select Yunus came when Hasina’s resignation created a power vacuum and left the future unclear for Bangladesh, which has a history of military rule, messy politics and myriad crises.

    Many fear that Hasina’s departure could trigger even more instability in the densely populated nation of some 170 million people, which is already dealing with high unemployment, corruption and a complex strategic relationship with India, China and the United States.

    Hasina, 76, was elected to a fourth consecutive term in January, in an election boycotted by her main opponents. Thousands of opposition members were jailed before the vote, and the U.S. and U.K. denounced the result as not credible.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the ‘God particle,’ has died at 94

    Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the ‘God particle,’ has died at 94

    [ad_1]

    LONDON — Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “God particle” that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94, the University of Edinburgh said Tuesday.

    The university, where Higgs was emeritus professor, said he died Monday following a short illness.

    Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle, which came to be known as the Higgs boson, in 1964. He theorized that there must be a sub-atomic particle of certain dimension that would explain how other particles — and therefore all the stars and planets in the universe — acquired mass. Without something like this particle, the set of equations physicists use to describe the world, known as the standard model, would not hold together.

    Higgs’ work helps scientists understand one of the most fundamental riddles of the universe: how the Big Bang created something out of nothing 13.8 billion years ago. Without mass from the Higgs, particles could not clump together into the matter we interact with every day.

    But it would be almost 50 years before the particle’s existence could be confirmed. In 2012, in one of the biggest breakthroughs in physics in decades, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that they had finally found a Higgs boson using the Large Hardron Collider, the $10 billion atom smasher in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

    The collider was designed in large part to find Higgs’ particle. It produces collisions with extraordinarily high energies in order to mimic some of the conditions that were present in the trillionths of seconds after the Big Bang.

    Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.

    Edinburgh University Vice Chancellor Peter Mathieson said Higgs, who was born in Newcastle, was “a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us.”

    “His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”

    Born in Newcastle, northeast England on May 29, 1929, Higgs studied at King’s College, University of London, and was awarded a PhD in 1954. He spent much of his career at Edinburgh, becoming the Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics at the Scottish university in 1980. He retired in 1996.

    One highlight of Higgs’ career came in the 2013 presentation at CERN in Geneva where scientists presented in complex terms — based on statistical analysis unfathomable to most laypeople — that the boson had been confirmed. He broke into tears, wiping down his glasses in the stands of a CERN lecture hall.

    “There was an emotion — a kind of vibration — going around in the auditorium,” Fabiola Gianotti, the CERN director-general told The Associated Press. “That was just a unique moment, a unique experience in a professional life.”

    “Peter was a very touching person. He was so sweet, so warm at the same time. And so always interested in what other people had to say,” she said. “Able to listen to other people … open, and interesting, and interested.”

    Joel Goldstein, of the School of Physics at the University of Bristol, said: “Peter Higgs was a quiet and modest man, who never seemed comfortable with the fame he achieved even though this work underpins the entire modern theoretical framework of particle physics.”

    Gianotti recalled how Higgs often bristled at the term “God particle” for his discovery: “I don’t think he liked this kind of definition,” she said. “It was not in his style.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus is granted bail in a Bangladesh graft case

    Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus is granted bail in a Bangladesh graft case

    [ad_1]

    DHAKA, Bangladesh — A court in Bangladesh on Sunday granted bail to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus in a $2.3 million embezzlement case.

    Yunus, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the use of microcredit to help impoverished people, was sentenced to six months in prison in January on a separate charge of violating labor laws. He was granted bail in that case too and has appealed.

    Prosecutor Mir Ahmmad Ali Salam said the embezzlement case involves a workers welfare fund of Grameen Telecom, which owns 34.2% of the country’s largest mobile phone company, Grameenphone, a subsidiary of Norway’s telecom giant Telenor.

    “The charges involve the embezzlement of over 250 million takas and money laundering. The accused gave the money to trade union leaders instead of the workers. This way they deprived the ordinary workers of their rightful earnings,” Salam said.

    Yunus and seven other defendants appeared in court Sunday and six others were absent.

    Defense counsel Abdullah Al Mamun told the court that Yunus, 83, and the others were innocent.

    Last year, more than 170 global leaders and Nobel laureates urged Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to suspend legal proceedings against Yunus. His supporters say he has been targeted because of his frosty relations with Hasina. The government has denied the allegations.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Bangladesh appeals court grants bail to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus in labor case

    Bangladesh appeals court grants bail to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus in labor case

    [ad_1]

    DHAKA, Bangladesh — An appeals court in Bangladesh on Sunday granted bail to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who had been sentenced earlier to six months in prison for violating the country’s labor laws. The court also agreed to hear an appeal against his sentencing.

    Yunus who pioneered the use of microcredit to help impoverished people, especially women, filed the appeal seeking bail on Sunday morning before it was granted. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 2006.

    The 83-year-old economist and three other officials of the telecommunications company were sentenced to six months in prison on Jan. 1, but they were immediately granted 30 days of bail to appeal the verdict and sentence.

    Sunday’s court decision said the bail would remain effective until a final decision is made on the appeal for the sentencing.

    Defense lawyer Abdullah Al Mamun said the first hearing on the appeal would be held on March 3.

    The case involves Grameen Telecom, which Yunus founded as a non-profit organization.

    Yunus’ supporters said the case is politically motivated, a charge that the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was elected for a fourth consecutive term earlier this month, has denied.

    In the original verdict, the judge said Yunus’ company violated Bangladeshi labor laws. At least 67 Grameen Telecom workers were supposed to be made permanent employees but were not, and a “welfare fund” to support the staff in cases of emergency or special needs was never formed.

    The judge also said that according to company policy 5% of Grameen’s dividends were supposed to have been distributed to staff but were not.

    The judge found Yunus, the chairman of the company, and the three other company directors guilty, and fined each 30,000 takas, or $260, while also sentencing each to prison.

    Yunus said after the original verdict that he was innocent.

    “We are being punished for a crime we did not commit. It was my fate, the nation’s fate. We have accepted this verdict, but will appeal this verdict and continue fighting against this sentence,” he told reporters after the verdict was announced on Jan. 1.

    Grameen Telecom owns 34.2% of the country’s largest mobile phone company, Grameenphone, a subsidiary of Norway’s telecom giant Telenor.

    Yunus is known to have close connections with political elites in the West, especially in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

    He faces a number of other charges involving alleged corruption and embezzlement.

    Yunus’ supporters say he has been targeted because of his frosty relations with Hasina.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel Prize in literature to be announced in Stockholm

    Nobel Prize in literature to be announced in Stockholm

    [ad_1]

    The Nobel Prize in literature will be announced Thursday, with the new laureate, or laureates, joining an illustrious list of past winners that ranges from Toni Morrison to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre — who turned down the prize in 1964

    ByDAVID KEYTON Associated Press and MIKE CORDER Associated Press

    FILE – A Nobel Prize medal is displayed during a ceremony in New York on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. The Nobel Prize winners of 2023 will be announced throughout the weeks of Oct. 2 and 9. (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP, File)

    The Associated Press

    STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in literature will be announced Thursday, with the new laureate, or laureates, joining an illustrious list of past winners that ranges from Toni Morrison to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre — who turned down the prize in 1964.

    This year’s winner or winners will be known at 1 p.m. (1100 GMT), assuming there is no slip-up similar to Wednesday, when a press release divulging the names of the three chemistry laureates was sent to Swedish media hours before the official press event to unveil the winners.

    Last year, French author Annie Ernaux won the prize for what the prize-giving Swedish Academy called “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwest France.

    Ernaux was just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated.

    On Wednesday, the chemistry prize was awarded to Moungi Bawendi of MIT, Louis Brus of Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology Inc. They were honored for their work with tiny particles called quantum dots — tiny particles that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

    Earlier this week, Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

    On Tuesday, the physics prize went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for producing the first split-second glimpse into the super-fast world of spinning electrons.

    The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences ends the awards season on Monday.

    The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma when they collect their Nobel Prizes at the award ceremonies in December.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

    ___

    Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Swedish media say winners of Nobel Prize in chemistry may have been announced early

    Swedish media say winners of Nobel Prize in chemistry may have been announced early

    [ad_1]

    STOCKHOLM — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on tiny quantum dots.

    Moungi Bawendi, of MIT, Louis Brus, of Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov, of Nanocrystals Technology Inc., were honored for their work with the tiny particles that are just a few atoms in diameter and whose electrons have constrained movement. This effects how they absorb and release visible light, allowing for very bright colors. They are used in many electronics, like LED displays.

    “These tiny particles have unique properties and now spread their light from television screens and LED lamps. They catalyze chemical reactions and their clear light can illuminate tumor tissue for a surgeon,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the award in Stockholm.

    In a highly unusual turn of events, Swedish media reported the names of the winners before the prize was announced.

    The academy did not comment on the leaked names before the announcement.

    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the physics, chemistry and economics prizes, asks for nominations a year in advance from thousands of university professors and other scholars around the world.

    A committee for each prize then discusses candidates in a series of meetings throughout the year. At the end of the process, the committee presents one or more proposals to the full academy for a vote. The deliberations, including the names of nominees other than the winners, are kept confidential for 50 years.

    On Tuesday, the physics prize went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for producing the first split-second glimpse into the superfast world of spinning electrons.

    The tiny part of each atom races around the center and is fundamental to virtually everything: chemistry, physics, our bodies and our gadgets.

    On Monday, Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

    Last year, Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a way of “ snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.

    The chemistry prize means Nobel season has reached its halfway stage. The prizes in literature, peace and economics follow, with one announcement every weekday until Oct. 9.

    The Nobel Foundation raised the prize money by 10% this year to 11 million kronor (about $1 million). In addition to the money, winners receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma when they collect their Nobel Prizes at the award ceremonies in December.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

    ___

    Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • 3 scientists win Nobel Prize in physics for looking at electrons in atoms

    3 scientists win Nobel Prize in physics for looking at electrons in atoms

    [ad_1]

    STOCKHOLM — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for studying how electrons zip around the atom during in the tiniest fractions of seconds, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.

    The award went to Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz and French-born Anne L’Huillier for their work with the tiny part of each atom that races around the center and that is fundamental to virtually everything: chemistry, physics, our bodies and our gadgets.

    Electrons move around so fast that they have been out of reach of human efforts to isolate them, but by looking at the tiniest fraction of a second possible, scientists now have a “blurry” glimpse of them and that opens up whole new sciences, experts said.

    “The electrons are very fast, and the electrons are really the workforce in everywhere,” Nobel Committee member Mats Larsson said. “Once you can control and understand electrons, you have taken a very big step forward.”

    L’Huillier is the fifth woman to receive a Nobel in physics.

    To understand how an electron travels, the scientists had to look at an extremely short time period — one quintillionth of a second known as an attosecond — just like a photographer uses a quick shutter speed when photographing a hummingbird.

    How small is it?

    “Let’s take one second, which is the time of a heartbeat,” Nobel Committee chair Eva Olsson said. To get the realm of the attosecond, that would have to be divided by 1,000 six times.

    Physicist Mark Pearce, a Nobel Committee member, said “there are as many attoseconds in a second as there are seconds which have passed since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. So it’s an extremely short period of time.”

    But even when they “see” the electron, there’s only so much they can view.

    “You can see whether it’s on the one side of a molecule or on the other,” L’Huillier, 65, said. “It’s still very blurry.”

    “The electrons are much more like waves, like water waves, than particles and what we try to measure with our technique is the position of the crest of the waves,” she added.

    The scientists’ experiments “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the prize in Stockholm.

    At the moment, this science is about understanding our universe, but the hope is that it will eventually have many practical applications in electronics, diagnosing diseases and basic chemistry.

    But L’Huillier, of Lund University in Sweden, said her work shows how important it is to work on fundamental science regardless of future applications because she spent 30 years on it before possible real word uses became more apparent.

    L’Huillier said she was teaching when she got the call that she had won. She joked that it was hard to finish the lesson.

    “This is the most prestigious and I am so happy to get this prize. It’s incredible,” she told the news conference announcing the prize. “As you know there are not so many women who got this prize so it’s very special.”

    Swedish news agency TT reached Krausz, 61, of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, by phone in Germany, where it is holiday.

    “My colleagues are enjoying their day off, but I hope that we will meet tomorrow and then we will probably open a bottle of champagne,” he was quoted as saying.

    Agostini is affiliated with Ohio State University in the U.S.

    The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million). The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

    The physics prize comes a day after Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

    Nobel announcements will continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 9.

    ___

    Borenstein reported from Washington and Corder from The Hague, Netherlands.

    ___

    Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel in medicine goes to scientists whose work led to mRNA vaccines against COVID

    Nobel in medicine goes to scientists whose work led to mRNA vaccines against COVID

    [ad_1]

    STOCKHOLM — Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic and whose technology could be used in the future to develop shots against non-infectious diseases like cancer.

    Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman were cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health,” according to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm.

    The panel said the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”

    Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps. T he messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code carrying instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.

    But simply injecting lab-grown mRNA into the body triggered a reaction that usually destroyed it. Karikó, a professor at Szeged University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Weissman, of the University of Pennsylvania, figured out a tiny modification to the building blocks of RNA that made it stealthy enough to slip past immune defenses.

    Karikó, 68, is the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. She was a senior vice president at BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make one of the COVID-19 vaccines. Kariko and Weissman, 64, met by chance in the 1990s while photocopying research papers, Kariko told The Associated Press.

    Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia, described the mRNA vaccines made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna Inc. as a “game changer” in shutting down the coronavirus pandemic, crediting the shots with saving millions of lives.

    “We would likely only now be coming out of the depths of COVID without the mRNA vaccines,” Hunter said.

    Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases expert at Exeter University, predicted the technology used in the vaccines could be used to refine vaccines for other diseases like Ebola, malaria and dengue, and might also be used to create shots that immunize people against certain types of cancer or auto-immune diseases including lupus.

    Peter Maybarduk, at the Washington advocacy group Public Citizen, welcomed the recognition of mRNA vaccines, but said the award should also be deeply embarrassing for Western countries.

    “This is a technology that should have been available to all of humanity but it was almost exclusively available only in the richest countries in the world,” he said, adding that much of the funding that led to the development of mRNA technology came from U.S. public funds.

    “The future is just so incredible,” Weissman said. “We’ve been thinking for years about everything that we could do with RNA, and now it’s here.”

    Karikó said her husband was the first to pick up the early morning call, handing it to her to hear the news. She then watched the announcement to make sure she wasn’t being pranked.

    “I was very much surprised. But I am very happy.”

    Kariko said she was the one to break the news to Weissman, since she got in touch before the Nobel committee could reach him.

    The two have collaborated for decades, with Kariko focusing on the RNA side and Weissman handling the immunology: “We educated each other,” she said.

    Before COVID-19, mRNA vaccines were already being tested for other diseases like Zika, influenza and rabies — but the pandemic brought more attention to this approach, Karikó said.

    “There was already clinical trials before COVID, but people were not aware,” she said.

    Karikó’s family are no strangers to high honors. Her daughter, Susan Francia, is a double Olympic gold medalist in rowing, competing for the United States.

    The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) — from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

    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 economics award on Oct. 9.

    ___

    This story has been updated to correct that Karikó is a professor at Szeged University, not Sagan’s University.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Associated Press writers Maria Cheng in London, Maddie Burakoff in New York and Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this report.

    ___

    Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel Prize announcements are getting underway with the unveiling of the medicine prize

    Nobel Prize announcements are getting underway with the unveiling of the medicine prize

    [ad_1]

    Six days of Nobel Prize announcements are beginning with the unveiling of the winner of the medicine award

    ByDAVID KEYTON Associated Press and MIKE CORDER Associated Press

    FILE – A Nobel Prize medal is displayed during a ceremony in New York on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. The Nobel Prize winners of 2023 will be announced throughout the weeks of Oct. 2 and 9. (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP, File)

    The Associated Press

    STOCKHOLM — Six days of Nobel Prize announcements begin Monday with the unveiling of the winner of the medicine award.

    The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was won last year by Swedish scientist Svante Paabo for discoveries in human evolution that unlocked secrets of Neanderthal DNA which provided key insights into our immune system, including our vulnerability to severe COVID-19.

    The award was the second in the family. Paabo’s father, Sune Bergstrom, won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1982.

    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 economics award on Oct. 9.

    The prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million). The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.

    The prize money was raised by 1 million kronor this year because of the plunging value of the Swedish currency.

    The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. The prestigious peace prize is handed out in Oslo, according to his wishes, while the other award ceremony is held in Stockholm.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.__

    Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel Foundation withdraws invitation to Russia, Belarus and Iran to attend ceremonies

    Nobel Foundation withdraws invitation to Russia, Belarus and Iran to attend ceremonies

    [ad_1]

    The Nobel Foundation has withdrawn its invitation for representatives of Russia, Belarus and Iran to attend this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies after the decision to invite them provoked strong reactions

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 2, 2023, 7:52 AM

    FILE – The Nobel laureates and the royal family of Sweden during the Nobel Prize award ceremony at the Concert Hall in Stockholm, Saturday Dec. 10 2022. The Nobel Foundation has withdrawn its invitation for representatives of Russia, Belarus and Iran to attend this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies after the decision to invite them “provoked strong reactions.” Saturday’s U-turn came after several Swedish lawmakers said they would boycott this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies. (Pontus Lundahl/TT via AP, File)

    The Associated Press

    STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Foundation on Saturday withdrew its invitation for representatives of Russia, Belarus and Iran to attend this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies after the decision announced a day earlier “provoked strong reactions.”

    Several Swedish lawmakers said Friday they would boycott this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, after the private foundation that administers the prestigious awards changed its position from a year earlier and invited representatives of the three countries to attend, saying it “promotes opportunities to convey the important messages of the Nobel Prize to everyone.”

    Some of the lawmakers cited Russia’s war on Ukraine and the crackdown on human rights in Iran as reasons for their boycott. Belarusian opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya on Friday called on the Swedish Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Committee not to invite representatives of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s “illegitimate regime to any events.”

    On Saturday, she welcomed the Nobel Foundation’s decision. She told The Associated Press that it was “a clear sign of solidarity with the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.”

    “This is how you show your commitment to the principles and values of Nobel,” Tsikhanouskaya said.

    Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who said Friday he wouldn’t have allowed the three countries to participate in the award ceremonies, was also happy with the decision. He posted on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that “the many and strong reactions show that the whole of Sweden unambiguously stand on Ukraine’s side against Russia’s appalling war of aggression.”

    The foundation said Saturday it recognized “the strong reactions in Sweden, which completely overshadowed this message” and therefore it had decided not to invite the ambassadors of Russia, Belarus and Iran to the award ceremony in Stockholm.

    However, it said that it would follow its usual practice and invite all ambassadors to the ceremony in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.

    Saturday’s announcement was widely praised in Sweden by politicians. Even the Swedish Royal House reacted with spokeswoman Margareta Thorgren saying, as quoted by newspaper Aftonbladet, that “we see the change in the decision as positive”. She added that King Carl XVI Gustaf was planning to hand out this year’s Nobel awards at ceremonies in Stockholm “as before.”

    This year’s Nobel prize winners will be announced in early October. The laureates are then invited to receive their awards at glittering prize ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • 176 world leaders and Nobel laureates urge Bangladesh to halt legal cases against Peace Prize winner

    176 world leaders and Nobel laureates urge Bangladesh to halt legal cases against Peace Prize winner

    [ad_1]

    DHAKA, Bangladesh — More than 170 global leaders and Nobel laureates have urged Bangladesh’s prime minister to suspend legal proceedings against Muhammad Yunus, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the use of microcredit to help impoverished people.

    In an open letter, the leaders, including former U.S. President Barack Obama, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and more than 100 Nobel laureates, said they were deeply concerned by recent threats to democracy and human rights in Bangladesh.

    “One of the threats to human rights that concerns us in the present context is the case of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus. We are alarmed that he has recently been targeted by what we believe to be continuous judicial harassment,” said the letter, dated Tuesday.

    “We are confident that any thorough review of the anti-corruption and labor law cases against him will result in his acquittal,” it said.

    Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina responded by saying she would welcome international experts and lawyers to come to Bangladesh to assess the legal proceedings and examine documents involving the charges against Yunus.

    “If they send the experts and lawyers, many more things will get revealed, which remain untouched. Many such things will come out,” Hasina said.

    In 1983, Yunus founded Grameen Bank, which gives small loans to entrepreneurs who would not normally qualify for bank loans. The bank’s success in lifting people out of poverty led to similar microfinancing efforts in many other countries.

    Hasina’s administration began a series of investigations of Yunus after coming to power in 2008. She became enraged when Yunus announced he would form a political party in 2007 when the country was run by a military-backed government and she was in prison, although he did not follow through on the plan.

    Yunus has also criticized politicians in the country, saying they are only interested in money. Hasina called him a “bloodsucker” and accused him of using force and other means to recover loans from poor rural women as head of Grameen Bank.

    Hasina’s government began a review of the bank’s activities in 2011, and Yunus was fired as managing director for allegedly violating government retirement regulations. He was put on trial in 2013 on charges of receiving money without government permission, including his Nobel Prize award and royalties from a book.

    He later faced more charges involving other companies he created, including Grameen Telecom, which is part of the country’s largest mobile phone company, GrameenPhone, a subsidiary of Norwegian telecom giant Telenor.

    Earlier this month, 18 former Grameen Telecom workers filed a case against Yunus accusing him of siphoning off their job benefits. Defense lawyers called the case harassment and vowed to fight the allegations.

    Separately, Yunus went on trial on Aug. 22 on charges of violating labor laws. The Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments brought the case against Yunus and three other people in 2021, alleging discrepancies during an inspection of Grameen Telecom, including a failure to regularize positions for 101 staff members and to establish a workers’ welfare fund.

    Yunus and 13 others were also named in a case brought by the Anti-Corruption Commission accusing them of embezzling funds from Grameen Telecom.

    In their letter, the global figures also urged that Bangladesh’s upcoming elections, expected to be held by early January, be credible.

    Hasina said the elections would be free and fair.

    The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has alleged that the elections will be rigged and threatened to boycott the voting if Hasina does not step down and hand over power to a caretaker government to oversee the balloting. Hasina has rejected the demand.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Nobel Peace Prize winners blast Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

    Nobel Peace Prize winners blast Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

    [ad_1]

    OSLO, Norway — The winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine shared their visions of a fairer world and denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine during Saturday’s award ceremony.

    Oleksandra Matviichuk of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties dismissed calls for a political compromise that would allow Russia to retain some of the illegally annexed Ukrainian territories, saying that “fighting for peace does not mean yielding to pressure of the aggressor, it means protecting people from its cruelty.”

    “Peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “This would not be peace, but occupation.”

    Matviichuk repeated her earlier call for Putin — and Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who provided his country’s territory for Russian troops to invade Ukraine — to face an international tribunal.

    “We have to prove that the rule of law does work, and justice does exist, even if they are delayed,” she said.

    Matviichuk was named a co-winner of the 2022 peace prize in October along with Russian human rights group Memorial and Ales Bialiatski, head of the Belarusian rights group Viasna. Later on Saturday, the other Nobel prizes will be formally presented during a ceremony in Stockholm.

    Bialiatski, who is jailed in Belarus pending his trial and faces a prison sentence of up to 12 years, wasn’t allowed to send his speech. He shared a few thoughts when he met in jail with his wife, Natallia Pinchuk, who spoke on his behalf at the award ceremony.

    “In my homeland, the entirety of Belarus is in a prison,” Bialiatski said in the remarks delivered by Pinchuk — in reference to a sweeping crackdown on the opposition after massive protests against an August 2020 fraud-tainted vote that Lukashenko used to extend his rule. “This award belongs to all my human rights defender friends, all civic activists, tens of thousands of Belarusians who have gone through beatings, torture, arrests, prison.”

    Bialiatski is the fourth person in the 121-year history of the Nobel Prizes to receive the award while in prison or detention.

    In the remarks delivered by his wife, he cast Lukashenko as a tool of Putin, saying the Russian leader is seeking to establish his domination across the ex-Soviet lands.

    “I know exactly what kind of Ukraine would suit Russia and Putin — a dependent dictatorship,” he said. “The same as today’s Belarus, where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored and disregarded.”

    The triple peace prize award was seen as a strong rebuke to Putin, not only for his action in Ukraine but for the Kremlin’s crackdown on domestic opposition and its support for Lukashenko’s brutal repression of dissenters.

    Russia’s Supreme Court shut down Memorial, one of Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organizations that was widely acclaimed for its studies of political repression in the Soviet Union, in December 2021.

    Prior to that, the Russian government had declared the organization a “foreign agent” — a label that implies additional government scrutiny and carries strong pejorative connotations that can discredit the targeted organization.

    Jan Rachinsky of Memorial said in his speech that “today’s sad state of civil society in Russia is a direct consequence of its unresolved past.”

    He particularly denounced the Kremlin’s attempts to denigrate the history, statehood and independence of Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations, saying that it “became the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine.”

    “One of the first victims of this madness was the historical memory of Russia itself,” Rachinsky said. “Now, the Russian mass media refer to the unprovoked armed invasion of a neighboring country, the annexation of territories, terror against civilians in the occupied areas, and war crimes as justified by the need to fight fascism.”

    While all the winners spoke in unison to condemn the war in Ukraine, there also were some marked differences.

    Matviichuk specifically declared that “the Russian people will be responsible for this disgraceful page of their history and their desire to forcefully restore the former empire.”

    Rachinsky described the Russian aggression against its neighbor as a “monstrous burden,” but strongly rejected the notion of “national guilt.”

    “It is not worth talking about ‘national’ or any other collective guilt at all — the notion of collective guilt is abhorrent to fundamental human rights principles,” he said. “The joint work of the participants of our movement is based on a completely different ideological basis — on the understanding of civic responsibility for the past and for the present.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Today in History: October 14, Martin Luther King wins Nobel

    Today in History: October 14, Martin Luther King wins Nobel

    [ad_1]

    Today in History

    Today is Friday, Oct. 14, the 287th day of 2022. There are 78 days left in the year.

    Today’s Highlight in History:

    On Oct. 14, 1964, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

    On this date:

    In 1066, Normans under William the Conqueror defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings.

    In 1586, Mary, Queen of Scots, went on trial in England, accused of committing treason against Queen Elizabeth I. (Mary was beheaded in February 1587.)

    In 1933, Nazi Germany announced it was withdrawing from the League of Nations.

    In 1939, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the HMS Royal Oak, a British battleship anchored at Scapa Flow in Scotland’s Orkney Islands; 833 of the more than 1,200 men aboard were killed.

    In 1944, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel took his own life rather than face trial and certain execution for allegedly conspiring against Adolf Hitler.

    In 1947, U.S. Air Force Capt. Charles E. (“Chuck”) Yeager (YAY’-gur) became the first test pilot to break the sound barrier as he flew the experimental Bell XS-1 (later X-1) rocket plane over Muroc Dry Lake in California.

    In 1964, Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev was toppled from power; he was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and by Alexei Kosygin as Premier.

    In 1981, the new president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak (HOHS’-nee moo-BAH’-rahk), was sworn in to succeed the assassinated Anwar Sadat. Mubarak pledged loyalty to Sadat’s policies.

    In 1986, Holocaust survivor and human rights advocate Elie Wiesel (EL’-ee vee-ZEHL’) was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

    In 1990, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein (BURN’-styn) died in New York at age 72.

    In 2008, a grand jury in Orlando, Fla. returned charges of first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse and aggravated manslaughter against Casey Anthony in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. (She was acquitted in July 2011.)

    In 2016, a judge in Connecticut dismissed a wrongful-death lawsuit by Newtown families against the maker of the rifle used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting massacre, citing a federal law that shielded gun manufacturers from most lawsuits over criminal use of their products.

    Ten years ago: Extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner landed gracefully in the eastern New Mexico desert after a 24-mile jump from a balloon in the stratosphere in a daring, dramatic feat that officials said made him the first skydiver to fall faster than the speed of sound. Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, at the age of 89, marked the 65th anniversary of his supersonic flight by smashing through the sound barrier again, this time in the backseat of an F-15 which took off from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Former Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, 82, died in Philadelphia.

    Five years ago: A truck bombing in Somalia’s capital killed more than 500 people in one of the world’s deadliest attacks in years; officials blamed the attack on the extremist group al-Shabab and said it was meant to target Mogadishu’s international airport, but the bomb detonated in a crowded street after soldiers opened fire. The board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revoked the membership of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, after published reports about sexual harassment and rape allegations against Weinstein.

    One year ago: New York real estate heir Robert Durst was sentenced in Los Angeles to life in prison without a chance of parole for the murder of a friend, Susan Berman, more than two decades earlier. (Durst died in prison in January 2022 at 78.) South Carolina state police said prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh had been arrested and charged with stealing insurance settlements that were meant for the sons of his late housekeeper. A work by British street artist Banksy that sensationally self-shredded just after it sold at auction three years earlier fetched more than $25 million — a record for the artist, and close to 20 times its pre-shredded price.

    Today’s Birthdays: Classical pianist Gary Graffman is 94. Movie director Carroll Ballard is 85. Country singer Melba Montgomery is 85. Former White House counsel John W. Dean III is 84. Fashion designer Ralph Lauren is 83. Singer Sir Cliff Richard is 82. Singer-musician Justin Hayward (The Moody Blues) is 76. Actor Greg Evigan is 69. TV personality Arleen Sorkin is 67. World Golf Hall of Famer Beth Daniel is 66. Singer-musician Thomas Dolby is 64. Actor Lori Petty is 59. Former MLB player and manager Joe Girardi is 58. Actor Steve Coogan is 57. Singer Karyn White is 57. Actor Edward Kerr is 56. Actor Jon Seda is 52. Country singer Natalie Maines (The Chicks) is 48. Actor-singer Shaznay Lewis (All Saints) is 47. Actor Stephen Hill is 46. Singer Usher is 44. TV personality Stacy Keibler is 43. Actor Ben Whishaw is 42. Actor Jordan Brower is 41. Director Benh Zeitlin is 40. Actor Skyler Shaye is 36. Actor-comedian Jay Pharoah is 35. Actor Max Thieriot is 34.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Today in History: October 12, China arrests “Gang of Four”

    Today in History: October 12, China arrests “Gang of Four”

    [ad_1]

    Today in History

    Today is Wednesday, Oct. 12, the 285th day of 2022. There are 80 days left in the year.

    Today’s Highlight in History:

    On Oct. 12, 1976, it was announced in China that Hua Guofeng had been named to succeed the late Mao Zedong as chairman of the Communist Party; it was also announced that Mao’s widow and three others, known as the “Gang of Four,” had been arrested.

    On this date:

    In 1492 (according to the Old Style calendar), Christopher Columbus’ expedition arrived in the present-day Bahamas.

    In 1792, the first recorded U.S. celebration of Columbus Day was held to mark the tricentennial of Christopher Columbus’ landing.

    In 1870, General Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Virginia, at age 63.

    In 1933, bank robber John Dillinger escaped from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang, who killed the sheriff, Jess Sarber.

    In 1971, the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway.

    In 1973, President Richard Nixon nominated House minority leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president.

    In 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.

    In 1986, the superpower meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate, with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev unable to agree on arms control or a date for a full-fledged summit in the United States.

    In 2000, 17 sailors were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.

    In 2002, bombs blamed on al-Qaida-linked militants destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians and seven Americans.

    In 2007, former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm over global warming.

    In 2011, a Nigerian al-Qaida operative pleaded guilty to trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (OO’-mahr fah-ROOK’ ahb-DOOL’-moo-TAH’-lahb) defiantly told a federal judge in Detroit that he had acted in retaliation for the killing of Muslims worldwide.

    Ten years ago: Thousands of supporters and opponents of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi clashed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the first such violence since Morsi took office more than three months earlier. The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize for fostering peace on a continent long ravaged by war.

    Five years ago: The Trump administration said it would “immediately” halt payments to insurers under the Obama-era health care law. President Donald Trump lashed out at hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico, saying the federal government can’t keep sending help “forever” and suggesting that the U.S. territory was to blame for its financial struggles.

    One year ago: The New Jersey Nets said Kyrie Irving could not play or practice with them until he could be a full participant; New York City required professional athletes to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to play or practice in public venues. (Irving would be allowed to rejoin the team for out-of-town games in January 2022, and for home games two months later.) The head of the Chicago police officers union called on its members to defy the city’s requirement to report their COVID-19 vaccination status or be placed on unpaid leave. The Boeing Co. told employees they must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or possibly be fired. Florida issued its first fine to a county that it said had violated a new state law banning coronavirus vaccine mandates; Leon County was fined $3.5 million.

    Today’s Birthdays: Former Sen. Jake Garn, R-Utah, is 90. Singer Sam Moore (formerly of Sam and Dave) is 87. Broadcast journalist Chris Wallace is 75. Actor-singer Susan Anton is 72. Pop/rock singer/songwriter Jane Siberry is 67. Actor Hiroyuki Sanada is 62. Actor Carlos Bernard is 60. Jazz musician Chris Botti (BOH’-tee) is 60. R&B singer Claude McKnight (Take 6) is 60. Rock singer Bob Schneider is 57. Actor Hugh Jackman is 54. Actor Adam Rich is 54. R&B singer Garfield Bright (Shai) is 53. Country musician Martie Maguire (Courtyard Hounds, The Chicks) is 53. Actor Kirk Cameron is 52. Olympic gold medal skier Bode Miller is 45. Rock singer Jordan Pundik (New Found Glory) is 43. Actor Brian J. Smith is 41. Actor Tyler Blackburn is 36. Actor Marcus T. Paulk is 36. Actor Ito Aghayere is 35. Actor Josh Hutcherson is 30.

    [ad_2]

    Source link