Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi win Nobel peace prize 2014
Friday 10 October 2014
Pakistani
teenager and Indian children’s rights activist beat Edward Snowden,
Chelsea Manning, the Pope and Vladimir Putin to the prestigious prize
Malala Yousafzai. Photograph: Bbc/PA
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage education campaigner shot on
school bus in 2012 by a Taliban gunman, has won the 2014 Nobel peace
prize.
Malala won along with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children’s rights activist.
The two were named winner of the £690,000 (8m kronor or $1.11m) prize
by the chairman of the Nobel committee - Norway’s former prime minister
Thorbjoern Jagland - on Friday morning.
Malala, now 17, was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman two years
ago in Pakistan after coming to prominence for her campaigning for
education for girls.
She won for what the Nobel committee called her “heroic struggle” for
girls’ right to an education. She is the youngest ever winner of the
prize.
After being shot she was airlifted to Queen Elizabeth hospital in
Birmingham, where she was treated for life-threatening injuries.
She has since continued to campaign for girls’ education, speaking
before the UN, meeting Barack Obama, being named one of Time magazine’s
100 most influential people and last year publishing the memoir I am Malala.
Last month a gang of 10 Taliban fighters who tried to kill her were arrested, the Pakistan army claimed. Malala speaks at the UN in New York on her 16th birthday in 2013.Photograph: STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images
In a statement, the Nobel committee said: “Despite her youth, Malala
Yousafzai has already fought for several years for the right of girls
to education, and has shown by example that children and young people,
too, can contribute to improving their own situations.
“This she has done under the most dangerous circumstances. Through
her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls’
rights to education.”
Satyarthi, the Nobel committee said, had maintained the tradition of
Mahatma Gandhi and headed various forms of peaceful protests.
“Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining
Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and
demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of
children for financial gain,” the committee said. “He has also
contributed to the development of important international conventions on
children’s rights.”
The Nobel committee said it “regards it as an important point for a
Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common
struggle for education and against extremism”.
Yemeni Nobel peace laureate Tawakkol Karman said Malala and Satyarthi were worthy winners and that Satyarthi had taken part in an “outstanding and long struggle for the rights of the child”.
There were a record 278 nominations this year,
19 more than ever before – including US whistleblowers Edward Snowden
and Chelsea Manning, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Pope
Francis. Also on the list of nominees was an anti-war clause in the Japanese constitution and the International Space Station Partnership.
Previous choices include illustrious names such as Nelson Mandela,
Aung San Suu Kyi, and Martin Luther King - and, controversially, Barack
Obama in 2009.
Last year’s choice of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
in hindsight seems a similar act of wishful thinking. At the time the
agency’s role in overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal
offered a very slim chance of finding a diplomatic resolution to the
crisis in that country. But the violence in Syria has only got worse,
and there are continuing concerns that the Assad regime has continued to
conceal its stockpile of chemical weapons.
On Wednesday, Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical
Chemistry, Göttingen, William Moerner of Stanford University in
California, and Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in
Virginia won the chemistry prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.
Worth 8m kronor each, the Nobel prizes are always handed out on 10
December, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.
Besides the prize money, each laureate receives a diploma and a gold
medal.
Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite,
provided few directions for how to select winners, except that the prize
committees should reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit
to mankind”.
1836 – 1846 * During this period the first English-language newspaper was launched under British-ruled Tenasserim, southern Burma . The first ethnic Karen-language and Burmese-language newspapers also appear in this period. March 3, 1836 —The first English-language newspaper, The Maulmain Chronicle , appears in the city of Moulmein in British-ruled Tenasserim. The paper, first published by a British official named E.A. Blundell, continued up until the 1950s. September 1842 —Tavoy’s Hsa-tu-gaw (the Morning Star ), a monthly publication in the Karen-language of Sgaw , is established by the Baptist mission. It is the first ethnic language newspaper. Circulation reached about three hundred until its publication ceased in 1849. January 1843 —The Baptist mission publishes a monthly newspaper, the Christian Dhamma Thadinsa (the Religious Herald ), in Moulmein. Supposedly the first Burmese-language newspaper, it continued up until the first year of the second Angl
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