Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2001, in two equal portions, to the United Nations and to its Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world.
For one hundred years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to strengthen organized cooperation between states. The end of the cold war has at last made it possible for the U.N. to perform more fully the part it was originally intended to play.
Kofi Annan has devoted almost his entire working life to the U.N. As Secretary-General, he has been pre-eminent in bringing new life to the organization. While clearly underlining the U.N.'s traditional responsibility for peace and security, he has also emphasized its obligations with regard to human rights. He has risen to such new challenges as HIV/AIDS and international terrorism.

Source: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2001/press.html

Tedesco, Priano III A    

Nobel Peace Prize 2003

 Shirin Ebad was born on 21 June, in 1947 in Iran.

She is a lawyer, and she fought to protect human rights and she is a very important activist defending women and children. She was awarded for her courageous efforts for democracy and human rights. The decision of the Nobel committee surprised many people around the world. People ,in fact, thought that the Pope John Paul II was the favourite because he was nearing death. After she won the Nobel prize, Shirin Ebadi wrote a book named “Democracy, human rights, and Islam in modern Iran: Psychological, social and cultural perspectives”. Since winning the Nobel Prize, Ebadi has lectured, taught and received awards in different countries. Her autobiography was released in an English translation.

Carola Lombardo 3rd A

Source: http://brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2003-04/03-126c.jpg; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_Ebadi
http://www.nobelforpeace-summits.org/

X-RAYS

X-rays were first observed and documented in 1895 by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a German scientist who found them quite by accident when experimenting with vacuum tubes.

A week later, he took an X-ray photograph of his wife's hand and he called it "X" to indicate it was an unknown type of radiation.

An x-ray source is turned on and x-rays are radiated through the body part of interest and onto a film cassette positioned under or behind the body part. A special phosphor coating inside the cassette glows and exposes the film. The resulting film is then developed much like a regular photograph. It is the special energy and wavelength of the x-rays which allow them to pass through the body part and create the image of the internal structures like the bones of the hand. 

X-rays are especially useful in the detection of pathology of the skeletal system, but are also useful for detecting some disease processes in soft tissue.

Today, 8th November, is the 115° anniversary of the discovery of X- Rays.

 Caterina Lucia

Marta Trapani

The laughing bishop

Desmond “Mpilo” (which means “life” in native Xhosa) Tutu is a South-African bishop, who was born in Klerksdorp in 1931 and took care about the protection of black-consciousness after the murder of the leader Steve Biko in King William’s Town. Tutu also won a Nobel Prize for peace in 1984 as a leader to a hundred commissions, charities and causes, a kind of conscience to the world. During Biko’s funeral he stood before a crowd talking about the end of white rule after the defeating of the apartheid.

He talked to crowd explaining that white people were wrong and immoral (according to the Lord’s word), so they had to lose anyway.

John Allen wrote a biography (Rabble-Rouser for Peace) about Tutu, the bishop that with a huge laugh became the world guardian. “God is biased, horribly in the favor of the weak. The minute and injustice is perpetrated, God is going to be on the side of the one who is being clobbered” said the laughing bishop, this is his philosophy that fuses Christianity with African culture.

It isn’t a message that ends his effect in Africa, but it can be expanded to all the world, in particular it’s perfect in zones of the globe where someone is oppressed from someone who doesn’t follow the ideals of peace and mutual respect.

Tutu could involve all these crowds because of his talent as a showman, his charisma isn’t common at all. He also talked and danced at the opening concert for South Africa World Soccer Cup. The secret of his success is in the faith. Something so simple and so difficult to find at the same time. Mpilo says: “In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut  the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable – there is no doubt at all that they will bite the dust.”
( from Time, 15 October 2010)

Chiara Tinè IV O

Giuseppe Torchiano IV O