Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2012
AP Staff Writer
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to its most controversial recipients yet. Accepting the award were astrologer and investigative journalist Eric Francis Coppolino, creator of the well-known Planet Waves phenomenon, and Aazzi, the 10-year-old African-Arab orphan who led the historic children’s crusade across Africa and the Middle East last spring, dramatically ending conflicts in the entire region and abruptly terminating the Israel-Palestine wars.
The prestigious Peace award was endowed by Alfred Nobel in 1895 for “champions of peace” who have done “the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” In recent decades, as global ecosystems have collapsed along with local and regional economies, these qualifications have come to encompass effective leadership in promoting civil rights and planetary survival.
Coppolino and his Planet Waves astrology service/website were shunned for decades by major media as well as the scientific and political communities, dismissed as what New York Times journalist Keith Schneider called “New Age claptrap.” This attitude changed dramatically last year when Coppolino’s work was endorsed by U.S. President Lucinda Gayheart and Russian premier Anton Ivanovich Lobachevsky, joint winners of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for accomplishing total nuclear disarmament through the widely-publicized Disarmament Race refereed by Lloyds of London two years ago.
“It’s a gambler’s dream, a bookie’s paradise,” Ms. Gayheart said at the time, as technicians in both nations frantically worked against the clock to dismantle thousands of warheads and computer-controlled triggering devices.
Subsequently, other nuclear nations scrambled to challenge each other to similar disarmament contests. The final race, between Israel and North Korea, was accomplished in record time, with world attention and betting at fever pitch.