Download
1 / 3
E N D
The prize committee in Oslo, Norway, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Friday to the international chemical weapons watchdog helping to eliminate the Syrian army's stockpiles of poison gas, The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Its inspectors have just begun with that work in the active Syrian war zone, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded them as they face arduous and life-threatening tasks. But the OPCW did not receive the prize primarily because of its work in Syria, committee chairperson Thorbjorn Jagland said. "It is because of its long-standing efforts to eliminate chemical weapons and that we are now about to reach the goal and do away with a whole category of weapons of mass destruction. That would be a great event in history, if we can acheive that.“ Protocol requires those awarding any Nobel prize not to inform recipients ahead of the prize announcement but instead to get in touch with them parallel to informing the public. The Nobel committee could not reach the OPCW to inform it of the win. In posts to Twitter, it requested the chemical watchdog group get in touch with it. The Norwegian Nobel Committee (made up of 5 members) selects the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize each year on behalf of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel's estate, based on instructions of Nobel's will. The Peace Prize is the fifth Nobel Prize to be awarded this week, preceded by honors in medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. On Monday, the final Nobel Prize will be awarded in the field of economics.
In Other News • Police are searching for a Norman Rockwell painting that disappeared from a storage warehouse in September. The oil on canvas painting, "Sport," shows a man in a rowboat wearing a yellow raincoat, holding a fishing pole. The image was published on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1939. The painting sold for $1,085,000 at a Sotheby's auction of American Art in New York on May 22. • Leaders in Utah say they found a way to get around the government shutdown. Utah will reopen its five national parks by Saturday, as well as three other nationally run locations. Utah's Governor Gary Herbert made the announcement Thursday, saying a deal had been reached with the U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. Utah agrees to pay the National Park Service (NPS) up to $1.67 million— $166,572 per day—to re-open eight national sites in Utah for up to 10 days. If the federal government shutdown ends before then, the State will receive a refund of unused monies. October is an especially profitable month for Utah's national parks, since optimal weather attracts a high volume of tourists. So the parks' closures would have had an especially high impact on the state. The Department of the Interior is now awaiting a transfer of funds from Utah, at which point it will notify "site-specific" personnel to return to work. The process of opening the parks after receiving the money should take some time, but in a statement from the governor's office, the state anticipates all sites should be "fully operational by Saturday.” In the event that the federal government shutdown drags on longer than the 10 days that have been accounted for, the state of Utah insists it would be able to make additional payments to keep the parks operational. The agreement between Herbert and Jewell stipulates that the money spent by the state can be reimbursed with Congressional approval. However, as with other funds spent during the shutdown, Congress is under no obligation to refund the bill. • Astronomers found a young, low-mass planet wandering through space alone. It has the current name PSO J318.5-22 . Because it is floating alone through space, rather than around a host star, astronomers can study it much more easily. 80 light-years from Earth, the 12 million-year-old planet has properties similar to those of gas-giant planets orbiting young stars.
