Ari Behn, the former son-in-law of King Harald V of Norway, has accused Kevin Spacey of groping him after a Nobel Peace Prize concert.
The Norwegian author, who was married to King Harald’s daughter Martha Louise until 2016, told radio station P4 that it happened after Kevin Spacey had hosted the event in 2007.
“I am a generous person, but this was a bit more than I had in mind,” he said.
Kevin Spacey has been accused of abuse and harassment by a string of men and has been written out of House of Cards.
A spokesman for the Hollywood star said last month that he was “taking the time necessary to seek evaluation and treatment” in the wake of the allegations.
Recalling the alleged incident, Ari Behn said: “We had a great talk, he sat right beside me.
“After five minutes he said, <<hey, let’s go out and have a cigarette>>. Then he puts his hand under the table and grabs me by the b**ls.”
Ari Behn said he put Kevin Spacey off by telling him: “Er, maybe later.”
He added: “My hair was dark at the time, I was 10 years younger and right up his alley.”
Last month, the Old Vic theatre in London said it had received 20 personal testimonies of alleged inappropriate behavior by Kevin Spacey while he was artistic director there.
The actor and producer has faced other allegations too, with the claims leaving his career in ruins.
He has been removed from the sixth season of House of Cards, which will instead focus on his on-screen wife, played by Robin Wright.
Kevin Spacey has also been replaced by Christopher Plummer in the new Ridley Scott movie All the Money in the World.
Bob Dylan has confirmed he will not travel to Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person.
The singer sent a “personal letter” to the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prizes, saying he was unable to attend December’s Nobel ceremony “due to pre-existing commitments”.
Image source Wikipedia
According to the Swedish Academy, Bob Dylan felt “very honored” and wished he could receive the prize personally.
He is required to give a Nobel lecture between now and next June.
Bob Dylan, 75, will not be the first recipient of the prestigious award to have been a no-show at the Nobel prize-giving ceremony.
Harold Pinter and Doris Lessing, winners of the prize in 2005 and 2007 respectively, were among others who did not attend the event.
The Academy said in statement: “The prize still belongs to them, just as it belongs to Bob Dylan.
“We look forward to Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture, which he must give – it is the only requirement – within six months counting from December 10, 2016.”
Bob Dylan was awarded the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
The Nobel Prize award ceremony and banquet will be held in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
Bob Dylan has finally said he accepts his Nobel Prize in literature, ending a silence since being awarded the prize earlier this month.
The singer-songwriter said the honor had left him “speechless”, the Nobel Foundation said in a statement.
The Nobel foundation said it had not yet been decided if Bob Dylan would attend the awards ceremony in December.
Image source Wikipedia
However, Bob Dylan reportedly told the Daily Telegraph he intended to pick up the award in person “if at all possible”.
The award was announced on October 13 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
However, Bob Dylan’s failure to acknowledge it raised eyebrows.
Last week, a member of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prizes, described Bob Dylan’s silence as “impolite and arrogant”.
However, on October 28, the Nobel Foundation said Bob Dylan had called Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, telling her: “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless. I appreciate the honor so much.”
Although the statement said it was unclear if Bob Dylan would attend the prize-giving banquet in Stockholm, the Daily Telegraph quoted the musician as saying: “Absolutely. If it’s at all possible.”
In an interview with the publication he described the prize as “amazing, incredible”.
“It’s hard to believe. Whoever dreams about something like that?” the publication quoted Bob Dylan as saying.
Malala Yousafzai and the Congolese doctor who helped rape victims are among this year’s Nobel Peace Prize favorites.
The winner of the most coveted of the Nobel honors will be revealed in Oslo at 11:00 local time Friday.
This year’s record list of 259 nominees remains a secret, but bookmakers and pundits say Malala is a contender.
Gynaecologist Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo is also tipped but predictions are often wrong.
Chelsea Manning, the US soldier convicted of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks has also been listed as a potential nominee.
Malala Yousafzai is among this year’s Nobel Peace Prize favorites
Others include Maggie Gobran, an Egyptian computer scientist who abandoned her academic career to become a Coptic Christian nun and founded the charity Stephen’s Children, and Russian former mathematics professor Svetlana Gannushinka who set up the rights group Civil Assistance.
If she wins, Malala Yousafzai, 16, will claim a gold medal, 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.25 million) and the title of youngest-ever Nobel laureate.
Malala Yousafzai emerged as a contender after continuing her work to promote better rights for girls despite being shot in the head by the Taliban in Pakistan.
The Pakistani young activist rose to prominence in 2009 after writing a blog anonymously for the BBC Urdu service about her life under Taliban rule in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.
On Thursday Malala Yousafzai was named as the winner of the EU’s Sakharov prize, a 50,000-euro ($65,000) award considered Europe’s top human rights accolade.
Bookmakers have placed Malala Yousafzai as 3/5 favourite on a list which includes long shots such as U2 singer Bono, Russian President Vladimir Putin and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Denis Mukwege, who has been listed as a possible Nobel laureate in the past, set up a hospital and foundation to help tens of thousands of women raped by militants and soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Like Malala Yousafzai, Denis Mukwege was also targeted by assassins a year ago. He escaped injury but temporarily sought exile in Europe.
Previous Nobel peace prize laureates include anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, US President Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
In 2012 the prize was awarded to the European Union in recognition of its contribution to peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 was awarded to Canadian author Alice Munro “master of the contemporary short story”.
Alice Munro, 82, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901.
Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway.
Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award – which is presented to a living writer – is worth 8 million kronor.
Last year’s recipient was Chinese novelist Mo Yan.
Alice Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950.
She had been studying English at the University of Western Ontario at the time.
Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, was Alice Munro’s first collection, and it went on to win Canada’s highest literary prize, the Governor General’s Award.
In 2009, Alice Munro won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work.
Alice Munro is the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious award since Saul Bellow, who won in 1976.
Alice Munro is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901
Often compared to Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro is known for writing about the human spirit and a regular theme of her work is the dilemma faced by young girls growing up and coming to terms with living in a small town.
The Nobel academy praised her “finely tuned storytelling, which is characterized by clarity and psychological realism”.
Since the 1960s, Alice Munro has published more than a dozen collections of short stories.
Her early stories capture the difference between her own experiences growing up in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.
In an interview in 2003, Alice Munro described the 1960s as “wonderful”.
It was “because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” she said.
Alice Munro’s writing has brought her several awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s prize and The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Other notable books include Lives of Girls and Women, Who Do You Think You Are, The Progress of Love and Runaway.
In 1980, The Beggar Maid was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction and her stories frequently appear in publications such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Several of her stories have also been adapted for the screen, including The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which became Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.
Alice Munro revealed earlier this year that her latest book, Dear Life, published in 2012, would be her last.
In 2009, Alice Munro revealed she had been receiving treatment for cancer. She also had bypass surgery for a heart condition.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”.
The three scientists “took the chemical experiment into cyberspace”.
Michael Levitt, a British-US citizen of Stanford University; US-Austrian Martin Karplus of Strasbourg University; and US-Israeli Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California will share the prize.
The trio devised computer simulations to understand chemical processes.
In doing so, they laid the foundations for new kinds of pharmaceuticals.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshe
“The Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2013 have made it possible to map the mysterious ways of chemistry by using computers,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Today the computer is just as important a tool for chemists as the test tube.
“Detailed knowledge of chemical processes makes it possible to optimize catalysts, drugs and solar cells.”
Arieh Warshel told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone that he was “extremely happy” to be woken in the middle of the night in Los Angeles to find out he had won the prize.
“In short, what we developed is a way for computers to take the structure of a protein and then to eventually understand how exactly it does what it does,” he told reporters.
Marinda Li Wu, president of the American Chemical Society, said the award was “very exciting”.
“The winners have laid the groundwork for linking classic experimental science with theoretical science through computer models.
“The resulting insights are helping us develop new medicines; for example, their work is being used to determine how a drug could interact with a protein in the body to treat disease.”
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson.
Peter Higgs, from the UK, and François Englert from Belgium, shared the prize “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.
In the 1960s they were among several physicists who proposed a mechanism to explain why the most basic building blocks of the Universe have mass.
The mechanism predicts a particle – the Higgs boson – which was finally discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson
“This year’s prize is about something small that makes all the difference,” said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
FrançoisEnglert said he was “very happy” to win the award.
“At first I thought I didn’t have it [the prize] because I didn’t see the announcement,” he told the Nobel committee, after their news conference was delayed by more than an hour.
Prof. Peter Higgs, of the University of Edinburgh, said: “I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy.
“I would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle and to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their support.
“I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.”
CERN director general Rolf Heuer said he was “thrilled” that this year’s prize had gone to particle physics.
“The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN last year, which validates the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, marks the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world,” he said.
Liu Hui, brother-in-law of jailed Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, is being held on fraud charges, his lawyer says.
Liu Hui was detained in January over a property dispute, his lawyer Mo Shaoping said, adding that the evidence against him was “insufficient”.
Liu Xiaobo was sentenced in 2009 for helping to draft a manifesto – Charter 08 – calling for political change.
Liu Xiaobo is currently serving 11 years in jail for inciting the subversion of state power
His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest ever since he was awarded the Nobel prize two-and-half years ago.
Confined to her Beijing apartment with no internet or phone access, and limited to weekly visits to family members, Liu Xia has described her house arrest as a painful experience.
Liu Xiaobo is currently serving 11 years in jail for inciting the subversion of state power. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 despite the Chinese government’s fierce opposition.
“[Liu Hui] should face trial soon, within a month,” Mo Shaoping told the AFP news agency.
The lawyer could not confirm whether the charges were connected with the activities of his brother-in-law, but said he had been under constant “surveillance by public security units” in recent months, AFP reports.
Some 134 Nobel laureates and Chinese activists wrote to Xi Jinping, the new head of the Communist Party, in December asking for Liu Xiaobo’s release.
Three U.S. scientists have discovered that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, not slowing down as previously thought.
The discovery, found by measuring the light from distant supernova explosions, turned the world of physics upside down – as well as the lives of the three American scientists who have been awarded a Nobel Prize for their findings.
The Nobel Prize for Physics winners studied dozens of exploding stars and realized that the expansion of the universe wasn't slowing down, as expected - it was accelerating
Half of the 10 million Swedish crown – $1.5million – Nobel Prize money went to Saul Perlmutter and the rest to two members of a second team which conducted similar work – American-born Brian Schmidt, who is based in Australia, and Adam Riess.
Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter
Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its statement that the discovery was made by looking at distant supernovae – which should have been becoming “brighter” as their acceleration away from our planet slowed down.
But instead of their light becoming brighter, it was fading.
“The surprising conclusion was that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down. Quite to the contrary, it is accelerating,” the Nobel committee said.
Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt
At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Adam Riess, who was still in his 20s when the research was published, joked to a colleague that he had been quick to react to a pre-dawn call from Stockholm:
“When I picked up the phone early this morning and I heard Swedish voices, I knew it wasn’t IKEA.”
Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess
Among the most exciting possible developments from study of dark energy would be a way to reconcile anomalies between physical laws observed at the subatomic level – quantum physics – with the laws Albert Einstein described.
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