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Today the top of the news tells us the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. Top advisers to Mr. Obama said they had no idea it was coming.
President Obama said that he was "surprised and humbled" by the award. "Let me be clear, I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations," the president said.
The committee said they awarded him the prize, out of the 205 nominations, because; "He has created a new climate in international politics."
Several world leaders have reacted in public statements. French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama embodies the "return of America into the hearts of the people of the world."
But former Polish President Lech Walesa, himself a 1983 Nobel Peace laureate after co-founding the trade union Solidarity and leading a 1980 strike in the Gdansk shipyards against the Soviet-bloc government, said, "So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far. He is still at an early stage. He is only beginning to act. This is probably an encouragement for him to act. Let's see if he perseveres. Let's give him time to act," Walesa said.
Yom Egeland, the executive director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, said the Committee's choice of Mr. Obama was "courageous and positive." Egeland said he believes it was the president's U.N. Security Council resolution to rid the world of nuclear weapons that resulted in the award going to Mr. Obama.
"It's a great idea, because it tells him, 'Don't break. The world appreciates you,'" said Alon Liel, a Hebrew University political scientist and a former director of Israel's Foreign Ministry who called the Nobel decision "brilliant". "It could give new energies, and an indication to people in this region that the world is not going to give up on this idea."
In Pakistan's central city of Multan, the reaction of radical Islamic leader Hanif Jalandhri, the secretary general of a group that oversees 12,500 seminaries, was more muted, "But I do hope that Obama will make efforts to work for peace, and he will try to scrap the policies of (former U.S. President George) Bush who put the world peace in danger".
As expected, a Taliban spokesman thought little of the award. "We have seen no change in his strategy for peace. He has done nothing for peace in Afghanistan," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Agence France-Presse by telephone from an undisclosed location.