Share of Nobel prize goes to 'everyone who strives for justice,' Obama says

Stunningly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama said Friday he was deeply humbled and regarded the award as "a call to action."

In a brief Rose Garden appearance on a sultry day before he huddled again with his war council to re-craft strategy in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama said his daughters helped him keep the award in perspective. He was informed in a pre-dawn call that he had been awarded the prestigious but often controversial prize only months after reaching White House.

"Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo's birthday!" the president said his 11-year-old daughter Malia had exclaimed, referring to the First Family's rambunctious and now year-old puppy.

Mr. Obama joins a disparate collection of previous honorees ranging from Nelson Mandela to Yasser Arafat, Mother Teresa to Mikhail Gorbachev and a coterie of organizations from Amnesty International to the Canadian-founded Pugwash conferences on world affairs and Medicines sans Frontieres.

The decision astonished the world and was widely criticized as premature, undeserved and a not-so-veiled expression of disdain aimed at former president George W. Bush by the Norwegian selection committee.

Video: People in Washington and Chicago react

But it was also hailed as a triumph of hope for change and a reflection of the global enthusiasm for America's first black president, who has vowed to transform the way the sole remaining superpower deals with the rest of the planet.

"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honoured by this prize," Mr. Obama said.

The President said he hoped to earn the distinction, and pointed to others who sacrifice more in the cause of freedom and peace.

"This award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity - for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard even in the face of beatings and bullets; for the leader imprisoned in her own home because she refuses to abandon her commitment to democracy; for the soldier who sacrificed through tour after tour of duty on behalf of someone half a world away," Mr. Obama said.

Those references were apparently to Iranian democracy activists, the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi who was awarded the prize 18 years ago but remains under house arrest and the more than 200,000 U.S. and coalition soldiers currently at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The committee said Mr. Obama deserved to be honoured for his bold, albeit unrealized, bid to eliminate nuclear weapons and his promises of change.

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the selection committee said.

Mr. Obama will give the $1.4-million cash prize - bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel - to charity.