Nobel Peace Prize | featured news

The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to promote peace and democracy in Europe, in the midst of the union's biggest crisis since its creation in the 1950s.

The past 12 months have seen a series of notable successes for African women - with two Nobel Peace prizes, a second president and the first female head of the African Union Commission. For the BBC's Africa Debate programme, Malawian women's rights campaigner Jessie Kabwila asks if Africa's women are on the rise.

In her Nobel lecture, the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi spoke of the hope the award kindled as she was under house arrest, and urged the world not to succumb to “compassion fatigue.”

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki, alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning, and former President Bill Clinton may be among the hundreds of nominees for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, rights activists say.

The nomination deadline for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize closed Wednesday amid renewed criticism that the award committee has drifted away from the selection criteria established by prize founder Alfred Nobel....

Three women who fought injustice, dictatorship and sexual violence in Liberia and Yemen have received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in the Norwegian capital.

Africa's first democratically elected female president, a Liberian campaigner against rape and a woman who stood up to Yemen's autocratic regime won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of the importance of women's rights in the spread of global peace. The Norwegian Nobel Committee split the prize between Tawakkul Karman, a leader of anti-government protests in Yemen; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman to win a free presidential election in Africa; and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, who campaigned against the use of rape as a weapon in her country's brutal civil war.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him acclaim as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since World War II.

An Israeli scientist won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for changing the prevailing views about the atomic structure of matter with his discovery of quasicrystals. Dan Shechtman, 70, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, will get the 10 million-kronor ($1.4 million) award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at a press conference in Stockholm today.

The prize, which cited advances in immunology, was called into question because Dr. Ralph M. Steinman died on Friday, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.