Poverty researchers win Nobel Economics Prize

STOCKHOLM - A trio of American economists on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for their work in the fight against poverty, including novel initiatives in education and healthcare, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Indian-born Abhijit Banerjee of the US, his French-American wife Esther Duflo -- a former advisor to ex-US president Barack Obama -- and Michael Kremer of the US were honored "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty," the jury said.

"This year's laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty," the jury said.

The science academy said that "more than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes," and that around five million children under the age of five still die every year from preventable or curable diseases.

The three found efficient ways of combatting poverty by breaking down difficult issues into smaller, more manageable questions, which can then be answered through field experiments, the jury said.

"They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected," it said.

"As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefitted from effective programs of remedial tutoring in schools. Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries," the jury said.

Duflo is only the second woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize in its 50-year existence, following Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

CLINICAL TRIALS

Duflo, 46, who is also the youngest person to ever receive the Economics Prize, told the Nobel committee in a phone interview the honor was "incredibly humbling".

"I didn't think it was possible to win the Nobel Prize in Economics before being significantly older than any of the three of us," she added.

Duflo has made her name conducting research, together with her husband who was her PhD supervisor, on poor communities in India and Africa, seeking to weigh the impact of policies such as incentivizing teachers to show up for work or measures to empower women.

Her tests, which have been likened to clinical trials for drugs, seek to identify and demonstrate which investments are worth making and have the biggest impact on the lives of the most deprived.

"Our vision of poverty is dominated by caricatures and cliches," she told AFP in a September 2017 interview.

Banerjee, 58, and Duflo are both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, while Kremer, 54, is a professor at Harvard University.

In the 1990s, Kremer used field experiments to test interventions to improve school results in western Kenya.

He has also helped develop programs to incentivize the distribution of vaccines for diseases in the developing world.

ONLY NOBEL NOT IN WILL

Unlike the other Nobels awarded since 1901, the Economics Prize was not created by the prizes' founder, philanthropist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, in his 1895 will. It was devised in 1968 to mark the 300th anniversary of Sweden's central bank, and first awarded in 1969.

Each of the Nobels comes with a prize sum of nine million Swedish kronor ($914,000, 833,000 euros), to be shared if there is more than one winner in the discipline.

But unluckily for recent winners, the prize's value has lost around $185,000 in the past two years, due to the depreciation of the Swedish krona.

The trio will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel.

Last year, the prize went to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer of the US for constructing "green growth" models that show how innovation and climate policies can be integrated with economic growth.

The Economics Prize wraps up a Nobel season that stands out for its crowning of two literature laureates, Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk for 2018 -- delayed by a year due to a sexual harassment scandal -- and Austrian novelist Peter Handke for 2019, whose selection sparked controversy because of his pro-Serb support during the Balkan wars.

Prior to that, the laureates in the fields of medicine, physics and chemistry were announced.

On Friday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the Peace Prize for his efforts to resolve the long-running conflict with neighbouring foe Eritrea.

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Nobel-winning author Toni Morrison dead at 88

US author Toni Morrison, whose 1987 novel "Beloved" about a runaway slave won a Pulitzer Prize and contributed to a body of work that made her the first black woman to be presented the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at the age of 88, her publisher said.

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, announced the death but did not provide an immediate cause. The Washington Post said she died on Monday at a New York hospital.

Morrison was a commercial as well as critical success, drawing praise for writing in a vivid, lyrical style while assessing issues of race, gender and love in American society.

"Beloved" was set during the U.S. Civil War and based on the true story of Sethe, a woman who killed her 2-year-old daughter to spare her from slavery. The woman was captured before she could kill herself and the child's ghost visits her mother.

Morrison told NEA Arts magazine in 2015 that she had already written a third of the book before deciding to bring in the ghost to address the morality of whether the mother was right to kill the child.

The New York Times called the death scene "an event so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single, unwavering line of fate. It will destroy one family's dream of safety and freedom; it will haunt an entire community for generations and ... it will reverberate in readers' minds long after they have finished this book."

The book was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, who co-produced it, and Danny Glover. Winfrey was one of Morrison's biggest fans and featured four of her books in the influential book club portion of her daytime talk show.

The novel was part of a trilogy that Morrison said looked at love through the perspective of black history. "Jazz," published in 1992, was about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s, and the third book, "Paradise," published in 1997, told of women in a small, predominantly black town.

'VISIONARY FORCE'

In honoring her with its literature prize in 1993, the Nobel organization said Morrison's novels were "characterized by visionary force and poetic import" while giving "life to an essential aspect of American reality."

Morrison was 39 years old when her first novel, "The Bluest Eyes" (1970) about a black girl who wanted blue eyes, was published. After working as an editor at a publishing house, she told panel discussion in 2016 that she wanted to "write the book that I really and truly wanted to read."

"I read all the time but I was never in those books," she said. "Or if I was, it was as a joke, or as some anecdote that explained something about the main character without the main character looking like me."

She followed that with "Song of Solomon" (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, "Tar Baby" (1981) and "God Help the Child" (2015). Her nonfiction books included an essay collection, a book of literary criticism titled "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" and editing anthologies.

Her 1986 play "Dreaming Emmett" was about Emmett Till, whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 was a key moment in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Morrison was born on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, and grew up in a family with a storytelling tradition. She graduated from Howard University in Washington, and earned a master's degree from Cornell University.

Morrison, whose only marriage ended in divorce, taught in colleges and was an editor at the publisher Random House before writing her own books. Later she would teach at Princeton University.

In 2012 Morrison was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, who called her a national treasure.

"Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy," he wrote on Facebook in a post accompanied by a picture of him with Morrison in the Oval Office. "She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page."

"I can think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni," Knopf Editor in Chief Sonny Mehta said. "... Her novels command and demand our attention. They are canonical works."

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Scientists behind cancer immunotherapies win Nobel medicine prize

STOCKHOLM/LONDON - American James Allison and Japanese Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday for game-changing discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer.

The scientists' work in the 1990s has since swiftly led to new and dramatically improved therapies for cancers such as melanoma and lung cancer, which had previously been extremely difficult to treat.

"The seminal discoveries by the two Laureates constitute a landmark in our fight against cancer," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said as it awarded the prize of nine million Swedish crowns ($1 million).

Allison and Honjo "showed how different strategies for inhibiting the brakes on the immune system can be used in the treatment of cancer," it said, adding that resulting treatments, known as immune checkpoint blockade, have "fundamentally changed the outcome" for some advanced cancer patients.

Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year. The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901.

The literature prize will not be handed out this year after the awarding body was hit by a sexual misconduct scandal. A Swedish court on Monday found a man at the center of the scandal guilty of rape and sentenced him to two years in jail.

"LIVING PROOF"

Allison's and Honjo's work focused on proteins that act as brakes on the immune system - preventing the body's main immune cells, known as T-cells, from attacking tumors effectively.

Allison, professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, worked on a protein known as CTLA-4 and realized that if this could be blocked, a brake would be released, unleashing immune cells to attack tumors.

Honjo, professor at Kyoto University since 1984, separately discovered a second protein called PD-1 and found that it too acted as an immune system brake, but with a different mechanism.

The discoveries led to the creation of a multibillion-dollar market for new cancer medicines. In particular, drugs targeting PD-1 blockade have proved a big commercial hit, offering new options for patients with melanoma, lung and bladder cancers.

U.S. drugmakers Merck & Co and Bristol-Myers Squibb currently lead the field after winning drug approvals in 2014, but Roche, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sanofi are also fielding rivals.

Sales of such medicines, which are given as infusions, are expected to reach some $15 billion this year, according to Thomson Reuters' consensus forecasts. Some analysts see eventual revenues of $50 billion.

Honjo, who is now 76, told a news conference in Tokyo he was honored to get the Nobel, but that his work was not yet done. "I would like to keep on doing my research ...so that this immune treatment could save more cancer patients," he said.

Allison also said he was "honored and humbled" by the award.

"I never dreamed my research would take the direction it has," he said in a statement on his university's website.

"It's a great, emotional privilege to meet cancer patients who've been successfully treated with immune checkpoint blockade. They are living proof of the power of basic science."

Commenting on Monday's award, Dan Davis, an immunologist at Britain's University of Manchester, said "this game-changing cancer therapy" has "sparked a revolution in thinking about the many other ways in which the immune system can be harnessed or unleashed to fight cancer and other illnesses."

Charles Swanton, chief clinician at the charity Cancer Research UK, said the scientists' work had revolutionized cancer and immunotherapy.

"The booming field of immunotherapy that these discoveries have precipitated is still relatively in its infancy, so it's exciting to consider how this research will progress in the future and what new opportunities will arise," he said.

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Nobel-winning writer V.S. Naipaul dies aged 85

LONDON -- British author V.S. Naipaul, a famously outspoken Nobel laureate who wrote on the traumas of post-colonial change, has died at the age of 85.

Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and the son of an Indian civil servant, was best known for works including "A House for Mr Biswas" and his Man Booker Prize-winning "In A Free State."

"He died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavor," his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul said in a statement on Saturday.

She described the outspoken author as a "giant in all that he achieved."

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul settled in England and studied English literature at Oxford University on a scholarship. 

But he spent much of his time travelling and despite becoming a pillar of Britain's cultural establishment, was also a symbol of modern rootlessness.

Naipaul's early works focused on the West Indies, but came to encompass countries around the world. He stirred controversy in the past, describing post-colonial countries as "half-made societies" and arguing that Islam both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures.

When he was awarded the 2001 Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy described him as a "literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice."

It said he was "the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings."

"His authority as a narrator is grounded in his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished," it said.

Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990, mixed fiction, non-fiction and autobiography without distinction. One of his seminal novels was the "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), which looked at the almost impossible task for Indian immigrants in the Caribbean of trying to integrate into society while keeping hold of their roots.

Overall he wrote more than 30 books, and was one of the first winners of the Booker Prize, now Britain's leading literary award, in 1971 for "In A Free State."

Violent affair

During his early career Naipaul was dogged by money worries and loneliness. He met his first wife, Pat, at Oxford, who became his constant literary support.

She died in 1996, and he later revealed that he felt he hastened her death by publicly admitting, while she fought cancer, that he had frequented prostitutes.

The admission "consumed her. I think she had all the relapses and everything after that... It could be said that I had killed her," 
Naipaul said in a tell-all biography by British author Patrick French, "The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V.S. Naipaul."

He had a quarter-century, sometimes violent, affair with an Argentinian, and he married Pakistani journalist Nadira Alvi the same year Pat died.

He was famously outspoken and had a reputation for cutting people out of his life, and once retorted: "My life is short. I can't listen to banalities."

The objects of Naipaul's ire ranged from corruption in Indian politics to the West's cynical treatment of its former colonies to the cult of personality in "The Return of Eva Peron."

He likened former British prime minister Tony Blair to a pirate at the head of a socialist revolution, and was also disparaging about "sentimental" female novelists.

"Women writers are different, they are quite different. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think (it is) unequal to me," he told the London Evening Standard newspaper in 2011.

He said this was due to women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world."

Naipaul also fell out with US travel writer Paul Theroux, who later wrote a bitter, no-holds-barred memoir of their long association. They later resolved their differences.

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Bob Dylan won't attend Nobel prize ceremony

STOCKHOLM - American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last month, has decided not to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said on Wednesday.

The notoriously media-shy Dylan said three weeks ago he would accept the 8 million crown ($870,000) prize, after repeated attempts by the award-giving academy to contact him since it named him as the winner on Oct. 13.

The Academy said on its website that it had received a letter from Dylan explaining that due to "pre-existing commitments" he was unable to travel to Stockholm in December.

"We look forward to Bob Dylan's Nobel Lecture, which he must give - it is the only requirement - within six months counting from December 10," it said in a statement, adding that it would provide additional information on Friday Nov. 18.

The lecture need not be delivered in Stockholm. When British novelist Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel literature prize in 2007, she composed a lecture and sent it to her Swedish publisher, who read it out at a ceremony in the Swedish capital.

Other Nobel Prize winners who have not attended the prize ceremony include Britain's Harold Pinter and Elfriede Jelinek of Austria.

The ceremony is planned to be held on Dec. 10.

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Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize for Literature

STOCKHOLM - Bob Dylan, regarded as the voice of a generation for his influential songs from the 1960s onwards, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature in a surprise decision that gave a singer-songwriter one of the world's most prestigious cultural awards.

His songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," "The Times They Are a-Changin," "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Like a Rolling Stone" captured a spirit of rebellion, dissent and independence.

"Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound," the Swedish Academy said on Thursday, when it awarded the 8 million Swedish crown ($930,000) prize.

More than 50 years on, Dylan is still writing songs and is often on tour.

"He is probably the greatest living poet," Swedish Academy member Per Wastberg said.

Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Nobel Academy, told a news conference there was "great unity" in the panel's decision to give Dylan the prize.

Literature was the last of this year's Nobel prizes to be awarded. The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.

($1 = 8.6231 Swedish crowns)

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Belarusian author wins Nobel Prize for Literature

STOCKHOLM - Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich has won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," the Swedish Academy said on Thursday in awarding the 8 million crown ($972,000) prize.

Literature was the fourth of this year's Nobel prizes. The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.

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