Hiking north of Kristiansand.

My son Mark and I have done a bit of hiking in the park north of Kristiansand over the past month or so.  This park is a mixture of pine and deciduous forest (lots of white-barked birch trees), with some swamp mixed in.  There are quite a few lakes, although these to some extent are the result of man-made dams. 

Here is Mark--he's holding the map, which we consulted frequently.

Mark identified this as a bilberry.

A big mushroom.

This is from a trail that we took up a hill.  Mark pointed out the grains of rock and suggested that they were the result of erosion.

2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Announced.

A few days ago, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 was awarded to Chinese dissident and pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.  Every year, the Nobel Committee, an organization headquartered in Oslo, Norway, gives the prize to someone whose life work has benefited humanity.  Here's a picture of Xiaobo:

Photo: Will Burgess/Reuters/SCANPIX from the Nobel Peace Prize website.

Last year, as a reward for his incessant advocacy of civil liberties and democracy, the Chinese government sentenced Xiaobo to eleven years in prison.  His crime was "inciting subversion of the state."  Xiaobo had helped author Charter 08, which had advocated that China adopt a democratic form of government.

The Peace Prize can trace its origins to the nineteenth-century Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (pictured below) who became immensely wealthy from devising and marketing high explosives--he invented dynamite.  Nobel died in 1896, and in his will he instructed that his fortune be used to award prizes in a variety of fields, including the promotion of peace.

Image from the Nobel Peace Prize website.

Past winners have been awarded not only for their efforts to foster peace between nations, but for efforts to stop government repression and end poverty.  Previous recipients include author Elie Wiesel, whose writings eloquently depict the barbarism of the Holocaust, Martin Luther King, Jr. for his leadership in the struggle against racial segregation, and in 1905 to Austrian peace activist Bertha von Suttner.   Suttner, one of the earliest recipients of the prize, is largely forgotten today, but she presciently forecast that future wars would be monstrous high-tech affairs. 

Much of the time, the prize goes to "agitators"--that is, writers or activists whose life goal is to highlight injustice.  This was presumably the Nobel Committee's thinking when it awarded the peace prize in 1975 to Russian physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, whose work on behalf of human rights challenged the Soviet Union's repressive policies.  Once in a while, the Committee awards the prize to powerful politicians who in its judgment have made important contributions to humankind--an example of this would be when the American President Theodore Roosevelt was given the prize in 1906 for his efforts to broker an end to the Russo-Japanese War. 

In any case, this year's award has really ticked off the Chinese government, which is making its displeasure known.  Bloomberg News reports:

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu violates the prize’s purpose and will hurt Norway’s relations with China, Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement on its website today....China summoned Norway’s ambassador Svein O. Saether to a meeting earlier today, Ragnhild Imerslund, a spokeswoman at the Oslo-based Foreign Ministry, said by phone. China’s Ambassador to Norway, Tang Guoqiang, also met with state secretary Erik Lahnstein, she said.

The New York Times:

As presidents, religious figures and rights advocates around the world praised the Nobel Committee and called on the Chinese government to release Mr. Liu, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, the Chinese government reacted with unrestrained ire.  They called in the Norwegian ambassador in Beijing for a dressing down, placed scores of dissidents under house arrest and angrily described the decision to honor Mr. Liu as “blasphemy” and an insult to the Chinese people.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports the following from China:

The world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner remained unreachable in a Chinese prison Saturday, while his wife's mobile phone was cut off and the authoritarian government continued to censor reports about democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo's honor.  Police kept reporters away from the prison where Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion, and his lawyer said that Liu's wife — who had been hoping to visit him Saturday and tell him the news of the award — has "disappeared" and he is worried she may be in police custody.  Chinese authorities, who called Liu a criminal shortly after his award Friday and said his winning "desecrates the prize," sank Saturday into official silence.

Sources used in this post:
The official Nobel Committee website is here: http://nobelpeaceprize.org/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-08/nobel-peace-prize-for-dissident-liu-has-china-warning-norway-on-relations.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/world/asia/10china.html?hp
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39588135/ns/world_news-asiapacific/  (AP news article)