Gorbachev announces nine winners of his new prize

MOSCOW, March 11 (Itar-Tass) -- Mikhail Gorbachev announced on
Thursday the first nine winners from six countries of the new prize
instituted by his foundation which will be awarded in the Royal Albert
Hall in London on March 30 during a charity concert devoted to the 80th
birthday of the first Soviet president.
The prize awarded for "changing the world" is broken down into three
nominations named according to famous Gorbachev's reform policy -
Perestroika (economic reform), Glasnost (press freedom), and Uskorenie
(accelerated development).
World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, first mobile phone caller
Martin Cooper, and Brazil's President and economic miracle-maker Luis
Inacio Lula da Silva won in Perestroika nomination.
CNN founder Ted Turner, film director Steven Spielberg, and Irish
musician Bono, who has been campaigning for over 20 years for third-world
debt relief and raising awareness of the plight of Africa, won in the
Glasnost nomination.
Google co-founder Sergei Brin, German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who
is best known for his theory on the concepts of "communicative
rationality" and the "public sphere," as well as Kenyan engineer Evans
Wadongo, who at the age of 18 designed a solar lamp for poor rural areas
of his country, won in the Uskorenie nomination.
"Each of the winners made a big personal contribution into the
development and transformation of the world in which we all live. I
congratulate them," Gorbachev said at the presentation held in the
residence of the British ambassador in Moscow.
He did not disclose the amount of the prize however award ceremony
producer Leonid Shlyakhover specified "it will be an item of jewelry art."
The prize is co-sponsored by the Nobel Prize Winners Forums, the
International Green Cross - an environmental organization founded by
Gorbachev in 1993, and the New Policy Forum also founded by Gorbachev. The
idea of the prize was proposed by the patronage committee of the charity
action Gorby-80. Man Who Changed the World devoted to the jubilee of the
first Soviet and Russian politician who won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Gorbachev Foundation said the "global conception (of the prize)
related to the determination of main developments, achievements and
changes on our planet convinced the organizers in the necessity to involve
people whose names deserve respect in the whole world and are closely
linked to changes that influence the development of the world community."
Gorbachev plans to award his prize annually in various countries of
the world.