Must Reads: A missing body, Taliban rehab and a Syrian bride

From the disappeared body of a Mexican gang leader to a Pakistani attempt at Taliban rehab, here are five stories you shouldn't miss from this past week in global news:

Peace Prize honors the sometimes discordant EU

In Syria, a female rebel goes to great lengths in uprising

Pakistan sends former Taliban fighters to militant rehab

Libya guards speak out on attack that killed U.S. ambassador

Leader of Mexico's Zetas drug gang proves elusive even in death

-- Emily Alpert in Los Angeles

Photo: A Syrian rebel during fighting against Syrian government forces in Aleppo on Thursday. Credit: Zac Baillie / AFP/Getty Images

European Union wins Nobel Peace Prize

LONDON -– The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of its contribution to promoting peace and harmony on a continent that gave rise to two devastating world wars in the past century.

The prestigious award offers a morale boost for the 27-nation EU at a time of major economic crisis, which has seen the organization's goal of integration and unity fray badly, especially its most ambitious project, the euro single currency.

Parties skeptical of the EU have risen in the polls across Europe as national economies sink into recession, partly as a result of the austerity cuts imposed as a solution to the euro debt crisis. Street protests are now almost a daily occurrence in countries such as Greece and Spain, where the pains of economic contraction have hit hard. Secessionist groups have gained momentum in nations from
Belgium to Italy.

The Nobel committee acknowledged those problems, but said it looked at the EU's signal achievement over time.

"The European Union is currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest. The Norwegian Nobel committee wishes to focus on what it sees as the EU’s most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation, and for democracy and human rights," said Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the committee. "The stabilizing part played by the European Union has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace."

Jagland noted that France and Germany alone had fought three wars between them in a 70-year period, ending with World War II. The two countries are now the main drivers of the EU and of the euro; their leaders are in constant contact and often coordinate policy.

"Reconciliation has become a reality," Jagland said. "Today war between Germany and France is unthinkable."

The EU was born out of the ashes of World War II, first as an economic entity known as the European Coal and Steel Community, comprising only a handful of nations in Western Europe. It now has 27 members, including many former Soviet satellites, and allows for free movement of goods and people across borders.

The announcement met with both praise and some raised eyebrows.

"Violent oppression of protesters and austerity measures count as peace now?" one Twitter user asked.

But Jagland said that even many of the protesters on the streets of Athens, Madrid and Lisbon still sympathized with the goal of European unity, calling them people who "do not want to lose what has been achieved."

EU President Herman Van Rompuy, on a visit to Finland, told reporters: "We are all very proud that the efforts of the EU for keeping the peace in Europe are rewarded."

Ironically, the prize was announced in Oslo, the capital of Norway, a nation that has steadfastly refused to join the EU.

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Photo: Flags of European countries are displayed in front of a flag of the European Union in Lille, France. Credit: Philippe Huguen / AFP/Getty Images

"We are all very proud that the efforts of the EU for keeping the peace in Europe are rewarded," EU President Herman Van Rompuy told reporters while on a visit to Finland.

Chinese praise a Nobel 'first' -- ignoring past winner

BEIJING -- Chinese state television hailed Mo Yan as "the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature" following the announcement Thursday of the 2012 award.

The report conveniently ignored Gao Xingjian, the Chinese-born French national whose 2000 Nobel award for literature was condemned by Beijing as anti-Chinese.

As part of its quest for soft power, Beijing has been obsessed for years about winning Nobel prizes, which in its view too often go to dissidents and emigres. Chinese authorities were especially stung by the peace prize awards to the Dalai Lama and most recently in 2010 to the dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year prison term for subversion of state authority.

Mo Yan probably will come under considerable pressure from the activist community to speak up on Liu’s behalf.

Over the years, Mo Yan has appeared on both sides of the Chinese political divide. His best-known book, "Red Sorghum," was initially banned in China, but in recent years he has irked fellow Chinese writers by cozying up to the Communist Party. At the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, he joined a government delegation in boycotting a seminar attended by dissident writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling.

Reaction in the dissident community was mostly hostile toward Mo Yan.

"For him to win this award, it’s not a victory for literature; it is a victory for the Communist Party," raged Yu Jie, a writer and democracy activist in a hard-hitting blog post. "A writer who praised Hiter couldn’t win this award, but a writer who praised Mao Zedong can."

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi honored at Oxford

LONDON -- Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader of the opposition in  Myanmar, made an emotional homecoming visit to Oxford University on Wednesday as she continued her first trip abroad in 24 years, much of that time spent as a political prisoner under house arrest.

At Oxford, where Suu Kyi studied beginning in 1964 and spent the early years of her married life, she received an honorary doctorate in civil law.

“Today many strands of my life have come together,” said Suu Kyi, speaking after the ceremony in the 17^th century Sheldonian Theater to academics, students and fellow honorary doctors.

“During the most difficult years I was upheld by memories of Oxford," she said. "These were among the most important inner resources that helped me to cope with all the challenges I had to face.”

During her long years under house arrest in her homeland, which is also known as Burma, Suu Kyi was unable to travel to Britain to visit her husband, Michael Aris, who died of cancer in 1999.

Her memories were simple but precious, she said: summer days spent on the river, “reading on the lawn, or in the library -- not reading but looking out of the window.”

But life as an Oxford student had taught her above all “to respect all that is the best in human civilization. ... It gave me confidence in humankind.”

Campus life was one “in which young people can make a world of their own,” a freedom “that our young people in Burma have not had for decades,” she said. “I would like a bit of Oxford ... in Burma.”

Her arrival in Oxford on Tuesday was feted  by academics, students, freedom campaigners and refugees with flowers, waves and cheers of support interspersed with singing and greetings as the day also marked her 67^th birthday.

Aung San Suu Kyi graduated in 1967, then lived in Oxford beginning in 1974 with her husband, an expert on Tibet. They had two sons.

She left her family in 1988 for Myanmar to lead the National League for Democracy in elections. The military junta first placed her under house arrest in 1989.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, which she finally was able to receive in Oslo over the weekend.

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 -- Janet Stobart

Photo: Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar holds her honorary degree in Oxford, England on Wednesday. Credit: Andy Rain / European Pressphoto Agency

Aung San Suu Kyi gives Nobel acceptance speech 21 years later

LONDON – Twenty-one years after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi made her acceptance speech at last on Saturday during her first tour of Europe after spending most of the last two decades under house arrest.

“When I joined the democracy movement in Burma, it never occurred to me that I might ever be the recipient of any prize or honor. The prize we were working for was a free, secure and just society where our people might be able to realize their full potential,” Suu Kyi said. “When the Nobel committee chose to honor me, the road I had chosen of my own free will became a less lonely path to follow.”

The 66-year-old democracy campaigner was greeted with a standing ovation by the glittering crowd inside Oslo city hall in the Norwegian capital. She spoke clearly and firmly, showing no sign of the exhaustion-induced illness that struck her at an earlier stop in Switzerland.

She recalled learning that she had won the 1991 Nobel Prize by hearing news of it on the radio in Burma, also known as Myanmar. With her movements restricted by the country’s ruling military junta, she was unable to receive the award in person; her now-late husband accepted it on her behalf. But the recognition helped ease her isolation.

“It had made me real once again. It had drawn me back into the wider human community, and what is more important, the Nobel Prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma,” Suu Kyi said. “We were not going to be forgotten.”

Her belated speech Saturday was made possible because of the Burmese government’s recent political liberalization, which has earned praise from around the world.

“There have been changes in a positive direction,” Suu Kyi said. “Steps towards democratization have been taken. If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future, but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.”

Rather, all sectors of Burmese society must actively participate in and support the reform process, she said. And in the only part of her address to be interrupted with applause, she called for the release of other political prisoners in her country.

“I am standing here because I was once a prisoner of conscience. As you look at me and listen to me, please remember the oft-repeated truth that one prisoner of conscience is one too many,” she said. “Those who have not yet been freed, those who have not yet been given access to the benefits of justice in my country number much more than one. Please remember them and do whatever is possible to effect their earliest, unconditional release.”

Suu Kyi’s tour of Europe will also take her to Ireland and to Britain, where she was once a student at Oxford. In London, she will enjoy the rare honor of addressing the British Parliament.

On Saturday, Suu Kyi emphasized the need for universal human rights to be upheld around the world.

“Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize means personally extending my concern for democracy and human rights beyond national borders. The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart,” she said, then urged her audience: “Let us join hands to try to create a peaceful world where we can sleep in security and wake in happiness.”

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-- Henry Chu

Photo: Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi delivers her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech 21 years after she was accorded the honor. Credit: Ragnar Singsaas / Getty Images

Suu Kyi to accept her Nobel in person; others didn't [Video]

Aung San Suu Kyi was to give her Nobel Peace Prize speech on Saturday in Oslo, 21 years after she got the award. Suu Kyi had long feared leaving Myanmar because she didn’t know whether its military government would let her return. The video above shows her sons and late husband  accepting the prize for her in 1991.

Her trip to Europe this week was feted as a sign of change in Myanmar, which allowed her opposition party to stand for elections this year. Here are the stories of some other Nobel laureates who didn't -- or couldn't -- pick up their prizes, drawn from The Times' archives.

Liu Xiaobo (2010)

A giant photo of Liu smiled out on the audience a few feet away from the potently symbolic empty chair where he would have sat had China allowed him to receive the award in Oslo, Norway. Liu, 54, is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for "inciting subversion of state power" because he helped draft a manifesto known as Charter 08 calling for democratic reform.

... Infuriated by the Nobel committee's decision, China had tried for weeks to pressure countries around the world to skip the ceremony, and even gave out a competing peace award earlier this week. But in the end, fewer than two dozen nations, among them Russia and Pakistan, stayed away.

Lech Walesa (1983)

Nobel laureate Grass sparks controversy with poem on Israel

REPORTING FROM BERLIN --Nobel Prize-winning German author Guenter Grass has found himself at the center of a firestorm for a poem he wrote that is highly critical of Israel.

Grass, best known for his 1959 novel "The Tin Drum," has been the target of condemnation by German lawmakers, Jewish leaders and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his poem “What Must be Said.” The poem, published Wednesday in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, accused Israel of hypocrisy for denouncing Iran’s nuclear program while allegedly maintaining one of its own.

“The nuclear power Israel,” he wrote, “is endangering an already fragile world peace.” 

Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons but has never publicly acknowledged it. 

In a sharply worded statement Thursday, Netanyahu blasted Grass for equating Israel and Iran.

“Guenter Grass's shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, a regime that denies the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel, says little about Israel and much about Mr. Grass,” Netanyahu said. 

Grass appeared on the public television station NDR on Thursday night to defend himself. 

“The overall tenor is not merely to address the content of the poem, but rather to wage a campaign against me, and to claim that my reputation is damaged for all time,” Grass said. 

The 84-year-old author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, shocked literary circles in 2006 when he admitted that he had been a member of the Waffen SS, a Nazi paramilitary unit, when he was 17. Grass had previously written critically about German military aggression and urged Germans to confront their Nazi past. 

Netanyahu said that, given Grass' Nazi involvement, “for him to cast the one and only Jewish state as the greatest threat to world peace and to oppose giving Israel the means to defend itself is perhaps not surprising.” 

Grass wrote in his poem that he had long avoided condemning Israel’s suspected nuclear program because he did not want to be labeled an anti-Semite. “But I will be silent no longer,” he wrote. 

The poem drew rebukes from Jewish leaders around the world and from German politicians. 

Hermann Groehe, general secretary of the Christian Democratic Union party, said he was “appalled by the tone and bias of this poem.” Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, without addressing Grass or the poem by name, warned that "to downplay the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program is to downplay the seriousness of the situation.” 

Grass said in another interview Thursday with the public television station that he had no intention of retracting his words. “By no means will I take it back,” he said.

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Photo: Author and Nobel laureate Guenter Grass at his home in Behlendorf, Germany, on Thursday. Credit: Marcus Brandt / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images

South Africa's ruling ANC passes controversial secrecy law

REPORTING FROM JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA -- South Africa’s ruling African National Congress government overwhelmingly passed a secrecy law Tuesday, ignoring months of protests from activists and editors and criticism from two Nobel laureates.

Critics said the law, which makes it illegal to reveal state secrets, will have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and investigative journalism. Their main complaint is that the measure doesn't allow a legal defense for acting in the public interest in exposing a secret, for example by revealing criminality, corruption or incompetence on the part of officials or the government.

Instead, anyone revealing a state secret faces up to 25 years in jail.

Activists supporting transparency and freer access to government information wore black Tuesday, in protest against the vote by the ANC-dominated parliament.

LIBERIA: President's Nobel Peace Prize criticized by election rival

REPORTING FROM JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, AND LOS ANGELES -- The news that President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and peace activist Leymah Gbowee have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was received with pride Friday by many in their native Liberia, a West African country scarred by a brutal and ruinous civil war.

But the timing of the announcement, just four days before Johnson-Sirleaf seeks reelection, angered some of her critics. Her main rival, Winston Tubman, called the choice provocative and unacceptable, Agence France-Presse reported.

Thorbjorn Jagland, head of the Nobel committee in Oslo, dismissed suggestions that the prize could influence the poll, saying the committee does not base its decisions on domestic political considerations.

YEMEN: Nobel Peace Prize winner still on front line of protest

Early this year, as the so-called Arab Spring swept across the Middle East and North Africa, Tawakul Karman moved into a tent in a sprawling encampment of anti-government protesters in Yemen's capital, Sana, that became known as Change Square.

That is where the journalist and human rights leader received the news Friday of her Nobel Peace Prize, and where fellow protesters came to congratulate her.

"All the Yemeni people now, all the [demonstrators] in Change Square, they are celebrating," she told Al Jazeera English in a telephone interview. "They are so happy, because this is their victory. It’s the victory for their methods in this revolution. ...  I am so proud of them."

The peaceful protests Karman organizes against President Ali Abdullah Saleh have been eclipsed in recent months by tribal fighting and government offensives. She said she has been threatened with jail and even death, but that she remains unbowed.

"I am in this square since February," she told Al Jazeera English. "I don’t leave this tent and this square."

In August, NPR visited the tent where Karman eats, sleeps and works on the ground. Her husband and three children visit on the weekends.

"Today is my beautiful day," she told NPR that day. "The one day a week I can spend with my family."

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-- Alexandra Zavis in Los Angeles

Photo: Tawakul Karman in a tent in Sana, Yemen, on Wednesday, two days before she was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Credit: Ahmed Jadallah / Reuters