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Obama said he doesn't "feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize" but that he would travel to Oslo in December to accept it as "a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century." He then rattled off a laundry list of problems. Beyond nuclear weapons and climate change, he said he hoped the prize would serve as a catalyst to grapple with the Middle East, violence, poverty, disease and racism. "Some of the work confronting us will...
...staff. So that is how most staffers were notified this morning - if they were awake. Shortly after 5 a.m., the Situation Room sent out an internal e-mail with the subject line: "Item of Interest: President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize." Phones quickly started ringing after that, including a call from Gibbs to wake up Obama just before 6 a.m. Five hours later, the President strode into the Rose Garden as the globe's newest Nobel laureate...
...interesting one to think about. Humility is a virtue - except when it isn't. We think of it as one of the attributes that make up a certain quiet acceptance of one's lot, even saintliness - think of Pope John XXIII. At the same time, what the books call false humility - the act of constantly saying that one is not worthy, a not-so-subtle way of provoking someone else to exclaim, "Oh! But you are!" - is one of the most annoying of all character traits. Uriah Heep, the creeping, up-sucking piece of dog s___ in Charles Dickens' David...
That is why Obama's acceptance of the award as a "call to action" was well judged. Let's be honest - as he was: he hasn't earned the Nobel Prize yet. If he does one day live up to the citation in the award, it will be because he was the opposite of humble: because he braved the enmity of some of his supporters by dedicating himself to peace between Israel and Palestine; because he backed his words against nuclear-weapons proliferation with action to stop it; because he reminded Americans, with John Donne, that...
...collateral damage stemming from the ongoing detention of film director Roman Polanski. Just two weeks after his impassioned protest of Polanski's Sept. 26 arrest, French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand finds himself under attack for his description of sex during trips to Thailand, which critics called sex tourism. Mitterrand, the nephew of late socialist President François Mitterrand, wrote about sex trips in a 2005 novel, detailing paying "boys" for sex. At the time the book was printed, the publisher's official description of La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life) unabashedly said the main character...