Nobel Prize

Rapper Nelly had some 'splainin' to do Friday. First of all, realize! You do not drive anywhere near the Sierra Blanca border patrol down in Texas. Police there will jack you up if their superschnozz dogs detect a whiff of contraband. Fiona Apple got done there last month, and Willie Nelson , Armie Hammer , and Snoop Dogg all have experienced this fine service. When the zealous fuzz inspected Nelly's tour bus, they found - whoa! - 36 small bags of heroin, 10 pounds of pot, and a .45 pistol.

James M. Buchanan, 93, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for applying the principles of economic self-interest to understand why politicians do what they do, died Wednesday in Blacksburg, Va. No cause of death was given. Mr. Buchanan, a professor emeritus at George Mason University, was a pioneer in the field known as public-choice theory, which views government decisions through the personal interests of the bureaucrats and elected leaders who want to advance in their careers and win campaigns.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, a cause of pride for a government that had disowned the only previous Chinese winner of the award, an exiled critic. National television broke into its newscast to announce the prize - exceptional for the tightly scripted broadcast that usually focuses on the doings of Chinese leaders. The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners, praised Mo's "hallucinatory realism" saying it "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.

Thanks to a couple of furious comebacks, South Jersey's Brandon Libby returns on Jeopardy! tonight as a two-time champ. The syndicated quiz show airs on 6ABC at 7 p.m. Libby, 33, who grew up and lives in Mount Ephraim, was in third place going into Final Jeopardy on Thursday's and Friday's shows, but each time he alone came up with the right question. (Want to test yourself? The answers were "1 of 2 American women authors nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938" and "The traditional inaugural lunch for this President & V.P. featured boiled stuffed lobster & prime ribs of beef au jus. " See correct responses at article's end.)

Father and son Gerard and Guillaume Depardieu play father and son - a literary giant and his estranged progeny - in A Loving Father. Jacob Berger's finely tuned, darkly funny melodrama begins with the reclusive Leo Shepard (the elder Depardieu) receiving news that he's won the Nobel prize for literature. En route to Stockholm, he meets up with Paul (Depardieu Jr.), a troubled 28-year-old who turned to drugs after one too many traumatic bouts with his distant, cruel, self-absorbed dad. Paul, in a car, follows Leo on his motorcycle, recklessly stalking him along Europe's motorways.

The economy was the number-one issue in the presidential race won by Democrat Barack Obama. So, what happens now? Can a president do anything? Let's find out. Prez can't fix it. Gerald Ford famously exhorted Americans to "Whip Inflation Now," partly by wearing "WIN" buttons. This preelection Newsweek article contests the notion that a president - any president - can "fix" the economy. It does, however, say that some presidential decisions over the years have managed to hurt the economy, at least temporarily.

So you think we've got cynics here in America. How about the comment from Moscow's Foreign Ministry spokesman when Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize? "This certainly was not the Nobel prize for economics," said Gennadi Gerasimov. How true! Despite Gorbachev's almost unbelievable accomplishments on the international stage, the bread lines in Moscow remain, and shortages of everything from vodka to potatoes threaten domestic peace and tranquility. Gorbachev's fault?

LONDON - While some Europeans swelled with pride when the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, howls of derision erupted from the continent's large band of skeptics. To many in the 27-nation bloc, the EU is an unwieldy and unloved agglomeration overseen by a top-heavy bureaucracy devoted to creating arcane regulations about everything from cheese to fishing quotas. Set up with noble goals after the devastation of World War II, the EU now appears to critics to be impotent amid a debt crisis that has widened north-south divisions, threatened the euro currency and plunged several members, from Greece to Ireland to Spain, into economic turmoil.

On a summer's day in 1943, a young scientist at Rutgers discovered an antibiotic that would change millions of lives. But Albert Schatz, who died in West Mount Airy in 2005, was denied credit. His name never appeared on the Nobel Prize given for that work.   That's the little-known story told in Peter Pringle's new book, Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug (Walker & Company, 269 pp., $26). And there's a widow who remembers, and a grandson conquering cerebral palsy to create a documentary film honoring his wronged grandfather's work.

STOCKHOLM - Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for a discovery that faced skepticism and mockery, even prompting his expulsion from his research team, before it won widespread acceptance as a breakthrough. While doing research in the United States in 1982, Shechtman discovered a new chemical structure - quasicrystals - that researchers previously thought was impossible. He was studying a mix of aluminum and manganese in an electron microscope when he found the atoms were arranged in a pattern that appeared contrary to the laws of nature.