Bush up for peace prize

George W Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and the Pope top this year’s list of 194 nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The US president's war drive and invasion of Iraq makes him, and his close ally the British prime minister unlikely candidates.

And the French leader, while an opponent of last year's second Gulf war, is also an outsider in the top peace prize stakes.

Much more likely for the honour is the ailing and aging Polish head of the Roman Catholic church.

The Nobel nomination period officially closed this week, with candidates named by the prize committee itself kept a fiercely guarded secret.

But thousands of other people, from academics to politicians, are also allowed to name peace-makers and often make their choices public.

Poet and former Czech president Vaclav Havel is again on the prize list.

Havel, praised for his role in the 1989 Velvet Revolution which brought about the fall of communism in his country, was favourite to win last year but lost out to lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi.

Ebadi was the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win.

Other nominees this year include former U.N. weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, jailed Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, U.S. senator Richard Lugar and Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya.

And the EU has been suggested for its enlargement to include former Soviet states.

The winner will be announced this October, with the awards ceremony taking place in Oslo in December.

The first Nobel Peace prize was awarded in 1901 jointly to Jean Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, founder of the first French peace society

Winners since have included Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King.

The prize is awarded by a committee of five people, chosen by the Norwegian parliament.

It is an independent committee and, since 1977, cannot include any government members.

The founder of the prize, Alfred Bernhard Nobel, was born in Sweden in 1833 and died in Italy in 1896.

Largely self taught, he worked as chemist and was the inventor of dynamite.

On his death he left most of his money to set up the Nobel Prize – awarded every year to the people whose work is judged to have been of the greatest benefit to mankind.

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