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For most of you, this is probably the very first time that you have ever heard about this.At least 500 Christians have been killed in an ongoing spate of coordinated door-to-door attacks and thousands of traumatized survivors have fled for their lives over the last two months in southern Ethiopia's Oromia regional state, including its capital Addis Ababa, according to reports.
"End the Nobel Peace Prize," The Atlantic declared in a headline on Friday. The award's past winners have a "spotty" record of achievement, the media outlet said, as many were honored for making efforts at peace that never came to fruition. Trump's nomination was apparently the last straw for The Atlantic, which said it "shows that peace had its chance and blew it."
While it's so far unclear how the freshly-signed deal between Israel and the the United Arab Emirates and the soon-to-be-inked one between Israel and Bahrain will work out, or whether the "peace deal" between Serbia and Kosovo will hold for long, Trump has already earned two nominations for the prestigious award, from a Norwegian and a Swedish MP respectively.
The Atlantic argued that it remains to be seen if any of these endeavors will bear fruit and not flop, as this is precisely what had happened to equally well-intentioned accords involving Israel in the past. But some critics have pointed out that the publication was not so categorical back when former US president Barack Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, based more on his campaign promises than any real accomplishments.
After receiving his Nobel, Obama started new wars and finished his last full year in office by dropping more than 26,000 bombs around the world and expanding the presence of US special forces to 70 percent of the world's 138 nations, more than doubling the reach of the George W. Bush administration.
Although Wood acknowledges that Obama won the accolade "for his promotion of, notably not his success in achieving, 'cooperation between peoples'" - and that instead of bringing peace, ended up "expanding America's drone program" - the timing of The Atlantic's vitriolic piece has prompted questions whether its demand to the Nobel Committee has more to do with the outlet's well-known distaste for Trump, rather then any genuine concern about the award's reputation.
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