Nobel Prize Awarded to Astrologer and Orphan

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.

“We were all winners. It was a thousand times more effective than any treaty or diplomatic agreement,” Gayheart said in her Nobel acceptance speech. “And we owe the whole idea to Planet Waves.”

Lobachevsky agreed heartily, even providing printouts of the decades-old Planet Waves story to reporters in Oslo. From that time on, Planet Waves has been a major, and openly acknowledged, source of both information and advice to world leaders and the media.

The Nobel committee highlighted the global impact of Planet Waves, which explores science, politics, environment and human behavior both within and without the over-arching structure of astrological analysis. “As a source of information, breaking news and common-sense, free of any corporate, commercial, or political influence, Planet Waves is unparalleled,” the Nobel citation says. It further emphasized Coppolino’s sometimes lonely and always dogged dedication to truth and honesty in human interactions with each other and with the planet.

Sharing the Peace award equally with Coppolino, Aazzi won the hearts of children worldwide at the age of 8 with her storybook rescue of a champion Arab stallion from the flaming ruins of a bombed stable in Tehran. Following Al Jazeera’s prize-winning documentary about the rescue, Aazzi used her fame to recruit other children in a campaign to end the violence that had killed her family, succeeding beyond her wildest expectations.

Often compared to Joan of Arc, and more often called the Pied Piper of the East, Aazzi led what grew to a vast parade of more than two million children on a pilgrimage through Africa, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the ruins of Gaza.

Linked by cell phones, instant messaging, internet connections and television coverage, children from across Europe and Asia converged on the vast army of children, swelling its ranks, followed by a supply train of mothers, fathers, chefs, doctors and other volunteers. “Incredible,” a French nuclear scientist said at the time, staring at his children’s empty rooms. “She’s like a black hole, sucking the children away as she goes.”

Again and again, sometimes singing, sometimes in awe-inspiring silence, the children confronted armies, governments, kings and generals, with one simple statement: “We are the future.” With those four words, the Nobel citation says, an orphaned child brought the world to its senses and accomplished what more than a century of war, diplomacy, privation and violence had failed to do.

Announcement of the Peace Prize recipients in October triggered a firestorm of vitriolic criticism, largely from scientific and media circles. Heads of state from a number of countries defended the Nobel committee’s decision, however, echoing the sentiments of N.E. Ramsey, recent recipient of the coveted Fields medal in mathematics. “Look, did science ever stop any war?” Ramsey asks rhetorically. “Did religion ever do anything except start wars? If it takes an astrologer and a little kid to do what they’ve never done, I’m all for it. Besides,” he adds, referring to the stunning photography on Planet Waves, “it’s about time we had a Nobel laureate with a proper appreciation of symmetrical titties.”

At the solemn awards ceremony in Oslo, Aazzi –- clad in a demure velvet dress with pinafore -– held Coppolino’s hand and grinned impishly at the King of Norway, who oversaw the event. The evening before, the King had personally intervened to prevent an international incident when management of the Radisson SAS Plaza Hotel attempted to evict Coppolino and Aazzi for roller-blading around the Sonja Henie Ballroom.