Pakistani teenager Malala wins Nobel Peace prize

Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Taliban two years ago for advocating girls' right to education, and Indian children's right advocate Kailash Satyarthi won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited the two "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.''

At 17, Malala is the youngest recipient of the prize.

Satyarthi, the Nobel committee said, had maintained the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and headed various forms of peaceful protests, “focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain”.

The prize, worth about $1.1 million, will be presented in Oslo on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the award in his 1895 will.

BREAKING NEWS: The #nobelprize2014 in Peace is awarded to Indian Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistani Malala Yousafzay pic.twitter.com/W1K0rh9An6

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2014

The announcement was made Friday in Oslo by Thorbjørn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There were a record 278 nominations this year, 19 more than ever before – including US whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Pope Francis. Also on the list of nominees was an anti-war clause in the Japanese constitution and the International Space Station Partnership.

Previous choices include illustrious names such as Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Martin Luther King - and, controversially, Barack Obama in 2009.

Last year’s choice of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in hindsight seems a similar act of wishful thinking. At the time the agency’s role in overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal offered a very slim chance of finding a diplomatic resolution to the crisis in that country. But the violence in Syria has only got worse, and there are continuing concerns that the Assad regime has continued to conceal its stockpile of chemical weapons.

The Nobel announcements have been going on all week, and will conclude with the prize for economics on Monday.

Yesterday the Nobel committee stunned the literary world by choosing little-known French author Patrick Modiano for the prize.

On Wednesday Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, William Moerner of Stanford University in California, and Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia won the chemistry prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.

On Tuesday Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, shared the physics prize with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”.

And on Monday, British-US scientist John O’Keefe and married couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser from Norway won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering the brain’s “inner GPS”.