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Thousands of officials are allowed to nominate Peace Prize laureates. Just like Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange's nominations, Edward Snowden’s nod should be ignored. If you have a paper thin skin (as I do) and are paid to comment on the news (this, for some mysterious reason, also applies to me), it’s advisable to fully disengage from writing about the Edward Snowden saga. After the initial leaks, I offered a cautious piece, urging against the instant beatification of the former NSA contractor. We knew little about him, I argued, so let’s wait for it to play out, and we’ll be...

Upset at President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Syria, members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family are threatening a rift with the United States that could take the alliance between Washington and the kingdom to its lowest point in years. Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a 'major shift' in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent U.S. overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday. Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that the United States had failed to...

Edward Snowden has apparently been living a life of poverty in Russia, surviving on meager charitable donations.

Last Friday, just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov were working out the final details of an agreement on the Syrian crisis, the Russian media went into high gear starting its drive for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Russian President Vladimir Putin. PravdaTV, a media outlet friendly to the Kremlin, produced and distributed a video clip opening with a scene of Putin tenderly caring for a Siberian tiger cub while the narrator says, “What does a peace prize mean, if not the prevention of war.” Scenes of Putin on location in the...

That buildup has been going on for some time. For the past two years, the government opposition in Syria has been getting aid from the U.S., which has smuggled surface-to-air missiles and other heavy weaponry into Syria through Turkey. Along with arms, the U.S. has supplied fighters for the conflict, drawing mainly from al-Qaida-linked militias in Libya and elsewhere. This operation was at the root of the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the ambassador and three other Americans. The Obama Administration has been working to cover up the facts about Benghazi not just because of the glaring incompetence of...

Revoke Obama's Nobel Peace Prize After receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama has made perpetual war look more perpetual than ever. Today, there are more U.S. troops in Afghanistan than when Obama took office. His presidency has widened the use of drones and other instruments of remote killing in several countries. Please sign this petition to the Norwegian Nobel Committee: I urge you to rescind the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to Barack Obama.

Once again, the toothless committee of unexceptional Norwegians has bestowed the world’s highest honor not for achievement, but for expectation. Hey EU! Kissinger and Obama are waiting to congratulate you backstage. In case you thought the crumbling, ineffective, and overly-bureaucratic European Union was on life-support, the Eurozone in danger of splintering, and the single currency on the verge of collapse, a group of unexceptional Norwegians would like you to remember that the 27 member states of the EU are, in fact, the global bulwark against war and misery. But when the Nobel Committee announced in Oslo on Friday that it...

Has the committee which runs the Nobel Peace Prize been infiltrated by satirists or opponents keen on discrediting the organisation? Norwegian radio reports this morning, carried by Reuters, suggested that the European Union is to be awarded the prize for supposedly keeping the peace in Europe for the last sixty years. Was this a Nordic spoof? Apparently not. It is only a few years since President Obama was ludicrously awarded the Nobel peace prize for winning the 2008 election and not being George Bush. Since then Mr Obama has continued the war in Afghanistan, stepped up drone attacks and got...

On Wednesday September 12, 2012 blogger Speak With Authority discovered that five days before 9-11, the US State Department sent out a memo announcing no credible security threats against the United States on the anniversary of 9-11. The Overseas Security Advisory Council, who posted the memo, is part of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security under the U.S. Department of State. The OSAC memo said: Terrorism and Important Dates Global 9/6/2012 OSAC currently has no credible information to suggest that al-Qa’ida or any other terrorist group is plotting any kind of attack overseas to coincide with the upcoming anniversary of September...

The Department of Health and Human Services last week announced it had awarded a $5.9 million grant to a University of Chicago Medical Center program tied to Michelle Obama and run by Eric Whitaker, one of President Obama’s closest friends. The Urban Health Initiative, which received the award, was originally based on a smaller program launched during the last decade by Michelle Obama, who was an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center before she departed to become first lady. The UHI is headed up by Obama basketball and golf buddy Whitaker, who has known the president since Obama’s...

PEACE, THEY SAY: A HISTORY OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, THE MOST FAMOUS AND CONTROVERSIAL PRIZE IN THE WORLD Jay Nordlinger What on Earth has happened to the Nobel Peace Prize, which once was easily the world’s most prestigious award? Consider that in 1953, Albert Schweitzer and Gen. George C. Marshall were honored on the same day (with Winston Churchill winning the prize for literature, incidentally). Then fast-forward four decades to the 1990s when it was won by Yasser Arafat and Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the Guatemalan who supported murderous Communist guerrillas and has been accused of fabricating parts of her...

The Nobel Foundation, which administrates the prestigious prizes in line with the will of Alfred Nobel, on Thursday rejected criticism of recent choices for the Peace Prize. "Despite that many lively discussions have been held on whether the chosen Peace Prize laureates fulfilled the prescribed provisions, the Foundation does not consider that the prize decisions made by the Norwegian Nobel Committee have entailed any such deviation," it said in a statement. Swedish authorities had asked the foundation to look into claims from Fredrik Heffermehl, a lawyer and author of the book "The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted," that...

Bill Clinton and Bradley Manning nominated for Nobel Peace Prize A total of 231 nominees are up for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, the Nobel Institute said on Monday, with Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, the EU and US soldier and WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning known to be on the list. 10:36AM GMT 27 Feb 2012 "As always, there are the usual 'nominees' and some newcomers, some famous and some unknowns, hailing from the four corners of the world," the head of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told AFP. With 188 individuals and 43 organisations, the number of candidates comes...

June 07, 2010 I SUPPOSE IF I SUGGESTED SUMMARY EXECUTION I WOULD BE CALLED "HARSH"? SNIPPET: "U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe Note that he didn't just lift a video and send it to Wikileaks. He also stole and released 260,000 classified US State Department diplomatic cables."

Nobel peace prize jury under investigation By KARL RITTER | Associated Press – 10 hrs ago. STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Nobel Peace Prize officials were facing a formal inquiry over accusations they have drifted away from the prize's original selection criteria by choosing such winners as President Barack Obama, as the nomination deadline for the 2012 awards closed Wednesday. The investigation comes after persistent complaints by a Norwegian peace researcher that the original purpose of the prize was to diminish the role of military power in international relations. /snip For example, in 2007 the prize went to climate activist Al...

Wow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DgOS6ZOvcJs

President Obama has deployed combat troops to central Africa to aid in the fight against the Lord's Resistance Army. In a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner, Obama says 12 troops with "appropriate combat equipment" were deployed on October 12 and approximately 100 in total will be deployed including a second combat team and headquarters, communications and logistics personnel. The forces will provide information and advise and assist "select partner nation forces," Obama explains. The troops will not fight except in self-defense. The full letter is after the jump.

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...

“When I received that award, I specifically said there was an irony because I was already dealing with two wars,” Obama said in an interview with CNN from El Salvador. “So I am accustomed to this contradiction of being both a commander-in-chief but also someone who aspires to peace.”

Michael Moore tweets that President Obama should return his Nobel Peace Prize after he approved military strikes on Libya.