Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize | featured news

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.

Two Americans and a British-Cypriot economist have won a Nobel prize for a theory that helps explain why many people can remain unemployed despite a large number of job vacancies.

The wife of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo has been detained in her apartment in Beijing, China, and is not allowed to see people or use her telephone, a human rights group citing her attorney said Sunday.

Imprisoned Chinese democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize - an award that drew furious condemnation from the authoritarian government and calls from world leaders including President Barack Obama for Liu's quick release.

An official with the Vatican criticized the decision to award the Nobel prize for Medicine to British doctor Robert G.

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision that honored the first-year U.S. president more for promise than achievement and drew both praise and skepticism around the world.

Three scientists who produced an atom-by-atom map of the mysterious, life-giving ribosome won the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday, a breakthrough that has been vital for the development of new antibiotics.