There has been outrage throughout the Far East against, what is seen as, a Euro-centered Prize. Most vocal has been Mr Por Kee-Pye, Thailand's Minister of Disinformation. Its not fair, Por told reporters, the Nobel Prize committee can only read English, French, Spanish, German etc. They just do not comprehend how much disinformation is put out in Asian languages. We have been working hard to keep the Thai people thoroughly misinformed on just about everything, but our work is completely ignored by the committee. The nominations for this year's Prize are as follows: 1. Steve Huffman. CEO of Reddit 2. Tony Hall. Director-General of the BBC. 3. Jimmy Wales. Founder of Wikipedia. 4. Josh Earnest, Assistant to the US President and Press Secretary. The Guardian thinks Angela Merkel and the FARC rebel leader should get a Prize: A record number of people and organisations have been nominated for the 2016 Nobel peace prize, which will be announced on Friday. This year 376 candidates – 228 individuals and 148 organisations – are in contention for the award. The selection of Nobel prizewinners is always shrouded in secrecy – the names of nominees are not released until 50 years after the decision is made, which makes predicting difficult, but here are some of those that Guardian writers think have a greater chance. Were Angela Merkel to win the Nobel peace prize it would hang like an albatross around her neck. When the German chancellor was a hot contender for it in 2015 in the light of her open-door refugee policy, there was strong domestic opposition to her receiving it, with 73% of Germans saying she had not earned it, according to one poll. Privately, Merkel was supposed to have expressed her relief that she didn’t get it, believing it would have restricted the style of her chancellorship. The jury in Germany is still out on whether the course she has put the country is the right one and any feeling the electorate gets, before next year’s general election, that the international community is pushing for Merkel’s re-election, could badly backfire. The refugee politics for which she is so praised outside of Germany, is also at the heart of ordinary Germans’ worries. They are asking whether the influx of refugees – more than 1 million last year, and several hundreds of thousands expected by the end of this year – is making Germany a less secure place. They also worry about the impact of refugees on integration, gender equality, public services and the labour market. Merkel is under huge pressure to show her government is able to deal with such concerns. In his speech to the UN refugee summit in New York in September Barack Obama thanked Merkel and the Germans for their efforts in dealing with the refugee crisis, an example of the moral pressure Merkel is under to ensure she does not do a U-turn despite growing domestic pressure. Merkel would be the first to agree that she does not need a Nobel peace prize to add to the pressure, and the jury should do her and Germany a favour by waiting at the very least, until she retires. The Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, and the leader of the leftist Farc rebel group, Rodrigo Londoño, known as Timochenko, were considered leading contenders for the awards for signing a peace deal last month to end 52 years of war. Their chances appear to have been dealt a fatal blow however following a referendum on Sunday that narrowly rejected the deal. The pair may have to redouble their negotiating efforts. Every government since the 1980s has attempted to end the war with the Farc, which rose up against the Colombian state in 1964. A deal was finally made between Santos, who has been president since 2010 and staked his political legacy on negotiating an end to the country’s internal conflict, and Londoño, who took over as leader of the rebels in 2011, and at one point had a $5m bounty on his capture from the US.
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