It's that time of the year again -- Norway's Nobel Committee has met to decide who should be the winner of its peace prize this year. Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland says the choice has "not been particularly difficult" this time round while pundits are placing their bets on representatives of the Arab Spring revolution which swept across the Middle East earlier this year. Among the top contenders are Google executive Wael Ghonim from Egypt, and Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni. Jagland also took the opportunity to defend the decision to award last year's prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, even though that immediately led to frozen Sino-Norwegian ties and possibly made life more difficult for Liu:

"The reactions (from China) were as expected. They were not more extreme than what we expected," he said. more ›

Shortly after returning home from a visit to the jail cell of her husband, Liu Xia was detained in a de facto house arrest. The wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner and political reform advocate Liu Xiaobo, made the trip to his northeast prison to visit him under police supervision. While she was not the first to inform him (we have the prison guards to thank for that) she did email The Times with a statement from Liu in which he dedicates the award to the victims of the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. more ›

The case of jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo flared up in the American media this weekend, after Liu's wife Liu Xia published a Washington Post editorial asking President Barack Obama to help get him released from jail. more ›