From The Daily Mail.
The committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize has controversially demoted its chairman for the first time in the 114-year history of the award.
Thorbjoern Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister of the Labour Party, has chaired the five-member panel since 2009 but was ousted after his right-wing opponents won a majority on the prestigious panel.
He will now revert to being a member of the committee that has received a near-record 276 nominees for the 2015 prize.
Kaci Kullmann Five, a former leader of Norway’s ruling Conservative Party, will now take over.
The country’s right-wing parties gained a new representative recently, giving them a 3-2 majority and allowing them to make the unprecedented demotion at the first meeting of 2015.
Declining to explain the decision, Ms Five said: ‘The committee chooses a leader every year.
‘This year is a new committee. Jagland has been a good leader for six years.’
Right-wing parties in the country, who won a parliamentary election in 2013 to oust a Labour-led government, have long disliked Jagland, who was prime minister from 1996.
Mr Jagland had attracted criticism after overseeing a number of controversial of awards, including ones made to Barack Obama in 2009 – less than a year after the U.S. president took office – to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and to the European Union in 2012.
No serving chair has ever been ousted since the awards were first made in 1901, even with shifting political majorities.
The Nobel committee really scraped the bottom of the barrel when they gave the prize to Obama, but then I remembered they also gave it to Jimmy Carter, Yasar Arafat, and Al Gore. Once upon a time, you actually had to accomplish something good to receive it.
Maybe the new committee will raise the standards again.