The Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo will bring the suspense to an end when it announces the winner on Friday at 11:00am (0900 GMT).

The backdrop is bleak: the number of armed conflicts worldwide involving at least one state has never been as high as in 2024, since Sweden’s Uppsala University started its global conflict database in 1946.

Trump has repeatedly said he deserves the prestigious prize for resolving “eight conflicts”, but experts predict he will not be the committee’s choice — at least not this year.

“No, it will not be Trump this year,” Swedish professor Peter Wallensteen, an expert on international affairs, told AFP.

“But perhaps next year? By then, the dust will have settled around his various initiatives, including the Gaza crisis,” he added.

Numerous experts consider Trump’s “peacemaker” claims to be exaggerated and express concerns over the consequences of his “America First” policies.

Donald Trump insists he deserves the prize for resolving ‘eight conflicts’, a claim which experts doubt.

“Beyond trying to broker peace for Gaza, we have seen policies that actually go against the intentions and what’s written in the will of (Alfred) Nobel, notably to promote international cooperation, the fraternity of nations and disarmament,” said Nina Graeger, who heads the Peace Research Institute of Oslo.

For Graeger, the list of Trump’s actions not aligned with the ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize is long.

Trump has withdrawn the US from international organisations and multilateral treaties, launched trade wars against allies and enemies alike, threatened to take Greenland from Denmark by force, ordered the National Guard into US cities and attacked universities’ academic freedoms as well as freedom of expression.

“We take the complete picture into account,” explained Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the five-member committee awarding the peace prize.

“The whole organisation or the complete personality of that person matters, but what we first and foremost look at is what they have been actually achieving for the sake of peace,” he said.

Uncontroversial pick?

This year, 338 individuals and organisations have been nominated for the peace prize, with the list kept secret for 50 years.

Tens of thousands of people are eligible to propose candidates, including lawmakers and cabinet members of all countries, former laureates, certain university professors and Nobel committee members.

The committee’s chair said its five members would take everything into account when awarding the prize

In 2024, the award went to Japan’s atomic bomb survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo for its efforts to ban nuclear weapons.

With no clear favourite this year, several names have been doing the rounds in Oslo ahead of Friday’s announcement.

Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms — a network of volunteers risking their lives to feed and help people enduring war and famine 1 have been mentioned, as has Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights election watchdog.

The Nobel committee’s choices in recent years have demonstrated “a return to more micro things, somewhat closer to classical ideas of peace”, with a focus on “human rights, democracy, freedom of the press and women”, said Halvard Leira, the director of the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs.

Japan’s atomic bomb survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo won the 2024 award for its efforts to ban nuclear weapons

“My hunch would probably just perhaps be for a not that controversial candidate this year,” he said.

The Nobel committee could also choose to reaffirm its commitment to a world order currently being challenged by Trump by giving the prize to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, or a UN body like its refugee agency UNHCR or the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA.

It could also give the nod to international tribunals such as the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, or champion press freedoms currently under attack by giving it to the Committee to Protect Journalists or Reporters Without Borders.

But the committee could also do as it has done many times before and pick a completely unexpected winner.

• New Navy fighter jet pits Boeing vs Northrop.
• Announcement likely this week, says source.
• Hegseth signs off on advancing plan last week. 

After months of delay, the Pentagon will select as soon as this week the defence company to design and build the Navy’s next stealth fighter, a US official and two people familiar with the decision said, in what will be a multibillion-dollar effort for a jet seen as central to US efforts to counter China.

Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman Corp are competing to be chosen to produce the aircraft, dubbed the F/A-XX. The new carrier-based jet will replace the Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fleet, which has been in service since the 1990s.

The decision to move ahead with a selection was made by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday, the US official and one of the people said.

The US Navy could announce the winner of the competition to build its fighter as soon as this week, one of the people said. But last-minute snags have delayed progress on the Navy jet in the past and could do so again, sources said.

The Navy and the Pentagon did not respond to several requests for comment.

Holdups on F/A-XX highlight broader questions about the future of naval aviation and the role of aircraft carriers in confronting China. Delaying the program or starving it of funds could leave the Navy without a modern fighter capable of operating from carriers in the 2030s and beyond, potentially undermining the fleet’s ability to project power.

The F/A-XX is expected to feature advanced stealth capabilities, improved range and endurance, and the ability to integrate with both uncrewed combat aircraft and the Navy’s carrier-based air defence systems.

China has been “incredibly ambitious in prototyping 6th generation aircraft and fielding 5th generation fighters and bombers, so this award could be viewed as an important decision to keep pace,” said Roman Schweizer, an analyst at TD Cowen.

Delay

A funding dispute in the spring and summer between the Pentagon and Congress delayed the program’s advancement.

The Pentagon sought $74 million for the jet to keep it on “minimal development funding.” Some Pentagon officials had sought to delay the program by up to three years, citing concerns about engineering and supply chain capacity, Reuters reported in May.

Congress and the Navy had wished to move forward with awarding a contract. Congress put $750 million to speed the F/A-XX jet into the massive tax-cut and spending bill which was signed into law this summer. Additionally, Congress earmarked an additional $1.4 billion for F/A-XX in fiscal 2026.

Beyond the funding dispute, there was also debate during the months-long delay about whether defence contractors Northrop and Boeing would struggle to make the jet on schedule.

Defence officials debated whether Boeing could employ enough engineers for the project after it was awarded a contract to build the US Air Force’s F-47 jet in March, sources said. They also debated whether Northrop would strain under the ballooning costs of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program, aimed at replacing the aging Minuteman III missiles, the sources said.

The quantity of F/A-XX jets, the value and exact timelines of the program remain classified, but previous such contracts — such as that for the F-35 — have been worth tens of billions of dollars over their lifetime.

The US Navy still plans to buy more than 270 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35C jets for its carrier fleet. Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin was ejected from the F/A-XX competition.

The first production jets are expected to enter service in the 2030s, while F/A-18s are expected to remain in service into the 2040s.

US-based scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “experiments that revealed quantum physics in action”, paving the way for the development of the next generation of digital technologies.

“My feelings are that I’m completely stunned. Of course it had never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke told the Nobel press conference by telephone on Tuesday.

“I’m speaking on my cell phone and I suspect that you are too, and one of the underlying reasons that the cell phone works is because of all this work.”

‘New surprises’ in century-old field of quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanical behaviours are well studied at the level of the incredibly small — atoms and sub-atomic particles — but are often seen as bizarre and unintuitive compared with classical physics and its far larger scale.

The Nobel winners carried out experiments in the mid-1980s with an electronic circuit built of superconductors and demonstrated that quantum mechanics could also influence everyday objects under certain conditions.

“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said.

Quantum technology is already ubiquitous, with transistors in computer microchips an everyday example.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, said in a statement.

Quantum computers use principles of quantum mechanics to make complex calculations, predict outcomes and perform analysis that in some cases could take traditional computers millions of years.

The field is considered to have the potential to help solve some of humanity’s most pressing concerns, such as tackling climate change. But it also faces challenges, including improving the accuracy of its chips, and timelines for commercially viable quantum computing remain disputed.