The Nobel Peace Prize for 2015 has been awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia. Speaking Friday in Oslo, Kaci Kullmann Five, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the group won "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011." The quartet, which includes Tunisian labour, industry, legal and human rights groups, was formed in the summer of 2013 when "the democratization process was in danger of collapsing as a result of political assassinations and widespread social unrest." "It established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war," the Nobel committee said. Last year, children's rights activist Malala Yousafzai, at the age of 17, became the youngest-ever Nobel laureate,when she shared the prize with India's Kailash Satyarthi. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be awarded on Oct. 12. Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded Thursday. On Wednesday, Sweden's Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich of the United States and American-Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research on DNA repair. A Canadian scientist, Arthur McDonald, shared Tuesday's Nobel Prize in Physics with Japan's Takaaki Kajita for their experiments demonstrating that subatomic particles called neutrinos change identities and have mass. On Monday the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to scientists from Japan, the U.S. and China who discovered drugs that are now used to fight malaria and other tropical diseases.
