Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

STOCKHOLM, Oct. 9 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced.

Obama was awarded the prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people," news reports from Oslo quoted the committee as saying.

U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement on the economy and the awarding  of the 2016 Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro in the Rose Garden of the White  House in Washington, October 2, 2009.(Xinhua/Reuters File Photo)

Born in August 1961, Obama is the 44th president of the United States.

A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004 and as a U.S. senator from 2005 to 2008.

Obama won the presidential election in November 2008 and was inaugurated in January 2009.

The winners of Nobel Prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry and literature have been announced in the previous days and the economic prize will be announced next Monday.

The Nobel prizes have been awarded annually since 1901 to those who "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind during the preceding year."

The prizes are usually announced in October and are handed out on Dec. 10, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite.

Each prize consists of a medal, a personal diploma and a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (about 1.4 million U.S. dollars).