Free Republic

Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker when the Nazis walled the Jewish quarter of her beloved Warsaw. The occupiers ruthlessly exacerbated the suffering in the ghetto by forbidding Poles from helping Jews. Sendler originally smuggled food and medicine into the ghetto, but changed tactics once she saw that the Nazis’ aim wasn’t humiliation but annihilation. “Very quickly we realized that the only way to save the children was to get them out,” she recalled. Sendler and her cohorts began smuggling Jewish babies and adolescents from the ghetto with their parents’ blessing. The women acclimated the kids to non-Jewish homes...

President Obama says there's no reason for him to return the Nobel Peace Prize he won two years ago, shortly after taking office, despite the obvious "irony" of America being involved in three different wars. Uh, make that two wars and one "kinetic military action." That, at least, seems to be the administration's preferred term for describing the enforcement of the UN-declared no-fly zone in Libya. In fact, military and national-security officials can't seem to stop talking about America's current "kinetic options" and "kinetic capabilities." Certainly, administration spokesmen have taken great pains to avoid referring to the ongoing operation as...

Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian politician behind the proposal said on Wednesday, a day after the deadline for nominations expired. The Norwegian Nobel Committee accepts nominations for what many consider as the world's top accolade until February 1, although the five panel members have until the end of the month to make their own proposals. Norwegian parliamentarian Snorre Valen said WikiLeaks was "one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency" in the 21st century. "By disclosing information about corruption, human rights abuses and war crimes, WikiLeaks is...

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid says the Senate's ratification of a nuclear arms treaty with Russia solidifies President Barack Obama's role as a world leader. [According to Reid] the treaty was about ... whether Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Reid says Obama has turned around American foreign policy.

China's Nobel Fury Backlash Parameswaran Ponnudurai 2010-12-11 Beijing's aggressive blitz to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize and its recipient may boomerang, analysts say. A portrait of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is projected on the wall of a hotel during a torch parade in Oslo, Dec. 10, 2010. China may have shot itself in the foot by its radical clampdown at home and aggressive diplomacy abroad over the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to jailed pro-democracy dissident Liu Xiaobo. By barring Liu and his wife from collecting the award, coming down hard on his supporters, and muzzling debate on the subject, Beijing's...

It’s time to think about nominating Julian Assange and Bradley Manning for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.  Who better to represent the views of the anti-American euro-lefties who select the winner –  five Norwegians selected by the Norwegian parliament — and their like-minded friends in the U.S.? Surely we could prevail on some of the Americans eligible to make nominations to consider Assange and Manning, given their preeminent contributions to the leftist cause.  After all, the Berkley, CA city council is about to declare Manning, who stole the documents Assange published, a hero and a patriot who deserves a medal. ...

Seoul sending envoy to Nobel event December 07, 2010 Korea’s government has decided to attend a ceremony to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to a jailed Chinese dissident later this week, a diplomatic source said yesterday, despite China’s opposition to countries supporting the honoree. China’s protest against the decision to give the prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo had put Korea in a diplomatic quandary over whether to attend the Dec. 10 ceremony in Oslo, Norway, amid concern that the move could have negative effects on relations with Beijing. The conundrum demonstrated China’s rising influence in the region. China is...

OSLO, Norway — China is not the first nation to be rankled by a Nobel Peace Prize. But its furious assault on the 2010 award to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo has reached proportions last seen during the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Even Cold War dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa were able to have their wives collect the prizes for them. Myanmar democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi's award was accepted by her 18-year-old son in 1991. But China's clampdown on Liu's relatives means the Nobel medal and diploma likely won't be handed out for the first time since 1936,...

China warns Western envoys off Nobel ceremony: diplomats by Pierre-Henry Deshayes Fri Nov 5, 12:17 pm ET OSLO (AFP) – China has warned other countries against attending the award ceremony in Oslo for Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, diplomats said Friday, in the latest sign of Beijing's irritation at the Norwegian Nobel Committee's pick this year. Diplomats from several countries said China's embassy in Oslo had sent letters to Western missions more or less implicitly cautioning them not to attend the prize ceremony on December 10 in the Norwegian capital. The decision to award the prize to Liu, a veteran...

Only 1 in 20 people on earth live in America. But Americans won 4 of 11 Nobel prizes this year. Last year, it was 8 of 9. Many of those American laureates are immigrants. Today, about 1 in 8 Americans are foreign-born, but 1 in 4 American Nobel laureates since 1901 are foreign-born. Immigrants, it seems, are chronic overachievers. America would benefit by letting more in. A third of Silicon Valley's scientists and engineers are immigrants. Forty percent of Ph.D. scientists working in the U.S. are foreign-born. They are sources of innovation, progress, and -- not to be ignored --...

WASHINGTON—A few days ago, I received an early-morning phone call from my father, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa: “The secretary of the Swedish Academy has just told me that I have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2010. They will announce it in nine minutes.” I shared my joy with him and thanked him for liberating me from a question with which I have been pestered for a couple of decades—“Why did your father not receive the Nobel Prize this year?” Then I thought how different Latin America would be by now if its political economy had resembled his...

This year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics goes to Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides, for their work on "search theory," especially as applied to labor markets. In the present article I'll explain the basics of their contribution but then point out the crisis in mainstream economics: even though these economists — especially Diamond — are very smart and productive, they and their colleagues have hardly helped the plight of the unemployed, as we stumble ever deeper into depression. Search Theory in the Labor Market According to the official press release, This year's three Laureates have formulated a theoretical...

One of President Obama's stalled nominees to join the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors won a share of the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday. Peter Diamond, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), received the award along with Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics "for their analysis of markets with search frictions," according to the Nobel committee's citation. Obama announced his intention to nominate Diamond as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board in late April. The Senate Banking Committee approved his nomination, along with several other nominees, in...

With news media across the globe reacting to this year's Nobel Peace Prize announcement, authorities in the winner's homeland are racing to delete his name from all public domains. Type "Liu Xiaobo" -- or "Nobel Peace Prize," for that matter -- in search engines in China and hit return, you get a blaring error page. It's the same for the country's increasingly popular micro-blogging sites. "Nobel Prize" was the top-trending topic until the authorities acted to remove all mentions of the award. Propaganda officials have also pulled the plug on international broadcasters -- including CNN -- whenever stories about Liu...

20 detained in Beijing for celebrating Nobel to Liu 2010-10-08 05:30:00 Beijing, Oct 8 (DPA) Police in the Chinese capital detained at least 20 human rights activists who were celebrating Friday's award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, one of the activists said. 'First we went to karaoke because we feel happy and we also took photos (of each other),' activist Wang Lihong told DPA by telephone. When the group of about 20 activists moved to a restaurant near the east gate of Beijing's Ditan Park, more than 50 police in a dozen vehicles...

Liu Xiaobo, a pro-democracy activist, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for his decades of non-violent struggle for human rights in China. Beijing was not impressed. Mr. Liu is currently in a Chinese prison serving out an 11-year sentence as the lead author of Chapter 08, a manifesto calling for free speech and multi-party elections.

wo scientists at Manchester University have won the 2010 Nobel prize for physics for creating the thinnest possible flakes of carbon. The news that Andre Geim, 51, and Konstantin Novoselov, 36, had received the 10m Swedish-kronor (£1m) prize was announced today by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Novoselov is the youngest Nobel laureate since 1973. Geim and Novoselov were both born in Russia and collaborated as PhD supervisor and student in the Netherlands before moving to Manchester University, one of Britain's top physics institutes. The scientists' breakthrough came from a deceptively simple experiment in 2004 that...

Excellent job by these guys...pass it around

'The slut's bitten me!' says he, clapping his hand to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand was red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and drags him into the Bashkai lot, while the priests howl in their lingo, 'Neither God nor devil, but a man!' And so it came to pass that Barack Obama, like Kipling's "Emperor" Daniel Dravot, was bitten, bloodied and forsaken. If you've read "The Man Who Would Be King" or seen the film, you know how it ends: Dravot, self-proclaimed divinity and King of Kafiristan,...

Milton Friedman, prime advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, was perhaps the most insightful and clearsighted advocate of Capitalism ever. Over here in Europe (where I live), a continent characterized by Socialism, tradition, but also by high IQ levels, he was awarded the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Few economists ever are. Considering the fact that Europe - and especially the Scandinavian countries - were very much into Socialism at that time, 1976, this might surprise some people not having studied the details of his life or that part of recent Scandinavian history. Why would anyone in Volvo Paradise...