Word: nobel
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...Served as chairman of the IAEA's policymaking governing body from 2005 to 2006 when the agency and its then director, ElBaradei, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2005. Amano accepted the prize on behalf of the agency. He will be the first IAEA director general from the Asia-Pacific region...
When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office...
...That tacit policy has now changed. As part of an intensifying campaign to silence Iran's opposition, authorities in Tehran last week confiscated Ebadi's Nobel medal from a safety deposit box and froze her bank account, according to Ebadi and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, which protested on behalf of the Nobel Committee in Oslo. A spokesman for the Iranian government denied that the medal was seized and said Ebadi's assets were frozen due to her failure to pay taxes. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle...
...other threats against close relatives. "In the past, there were red lines people believed the regime would never cross, but no red lines really exist anymore," says Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "What is to be gained from confiscating Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Prize or assaulting her husband? It's almost as if Iran is trying to parody a gratuitously cruel, dictatorial regime...
...government's focus on Ebadi seems to be designed to hit her before she regains too much power as the thorniest critic in the government's side. But the seizure of her Nobel medal and the threats against her family seem poorly calculated. "The irony of all this is that such policies give Ms. Ebadi more prominence," says Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the University of Hawaii. "In effect they make her harassment itself the human-rights message that they are trying so hard to prevent her from expressing...