Nobel Peace Prize Awarded

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Nobel Peace Prize Awarded
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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.
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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
  dayto 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.