I thought it was an elaborate hoax when I saw the headline, but now it looks like they're serious.
OSLO (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament, in a surprise award that drew both warm praise and sharp criticism.
The decision to bestow one of the world's top accolades on a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, was greeted with gasps of astonishment from journalists at the announcement in Oslo.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
The Times (in London) comments:
The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.
And then this happens:
Two U.S. spacecraft crashed on the moon Friday. On purpose. NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite dropped its Centaur upper-stage rocket on the lunar surface at 7:31 a.m. ET.
This prompted the Norwegian Nobel Committee to withdraw the Peace Prize for the "illegal and unwarranted attack on the Moon".
(Just kidding about the last part, which unfortunately isn't as funny as the first part.)
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