prize

While Sherrock was celebrating, Ireland’s ‘Fierce’ Pearse Mackle, a 21-year-old university student from County Cavan, was left wondering what could have been.

Mackle, who competes on PDC’s Development Tour, was the eighth competitor and failed to hit a match-winning bullseye, instead finding the nine, and his life-changing moment came and went.

He was the only other player, apart from Sherrock, to cause Littler a fright.

For most of the night, Littler cruised through the competition as he went in search of the £501,000, which he had said he would donate to charity.

With former England footballer Gary Lineker hosting and with comedian Lee Mack and television presenter Richard Osman joining Turner as part of the punditry team, this was a night to bring darts to a new audience.

The first challenger was 16-year-old Kasey Smith from Manchester, but Littler showed he was in no mood to mess about, hitting treble 20s against her with his first two darts on his way to an easy win.

Some of Littler’s opponents had never played a competitive game of darts, although everyone was keen to make the most of the experience.

With John McDonald, who retired as the main PDC master of ceremonies after the 2026 World Championship final, announcing the players before their elaborate walk-ons, this was a fun event, although most players came nowhere near beating Littler.

But there were still entertaining moments. Fourteen-year-old Jayden Walker, a year 10 pupil from Dorset, threw off a school blazer and tie to reveal his darts outfit and, as the third-highest ranked player, threatened to cause a huge shock.

But Littler raised his game when he needed to, hitting a maximum 180 followed by a 158 checkout, the highest of the night, to defeat his fellow teenager in only 12 darts.

Taylon Forrester, 18, described himself as a “binman who works with his dad” and he jumped out of a dumpster on his way to the oche.

Other entrants included Zac Spain, a jockey from Melbourne, Australia, Frenchman Theodore Wallich, who dubbed himself the ‘Moustache Kid’, 57-year-old Mark Pooke, another 14-year-old in Makinley Cooper-Johnson and Will Kemp, back playing after a heart attack earlier this year.

But Sherrock, whose participation in the competition had been questioned because of her past achievements in the sport, was the real winner, even if she had been described by Lineker as a “hairdresser from Milton Keynes”.

With Littler on stage for more than two hours, he inevitably tired with his standard dropping and Sherrock was the one to take advantage, winning in a 15-dart leg in match number 15.

Hearn reappeared to present Sherrock with a huge cheque for her life-changing victory to end a surreal night of action.

Remember the FIFA Peace Prize awarded to United States President Donald Trump six months before the World Cup? Well, it is now close to being scrapped, which would make the US president its first and only winner.

Less than a year after FIFA President Gianni Infantino extolled Trump in the US capital while presenting the award at the World Cup 2026 draw, several members of the FIFA Council are questioning its merit and have demanded changes, including scrapping the award.

The calls for scrutiny come at a time when Infantino faces ongoing criticism for his World Cup sell-off plan, which also led to calls for his removal from office.

So what was the prize about, and why might it be scrapped? Here’s a look:

What is the FIFA Peace Prize?

On November 5, football’s global governing body announced a new annual award called the “FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World”.

FIFA said the award was created to “reward individuals who have taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace”.

Why did Trump receive the FIFA Peace Prize?

A month later, Trump became the first recipient of the award.

The US leader had been heavily favoured to win the inaugural prize after failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize despite an aggressive campaign involving endorsements from other world leaders.

Trump thanked FIFA and called the award “one of the great honours of my life”.

He and Infantino are close allies, and the FIFA chief had made it clear that he thought Trump should have won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to broker a ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“This is your prize. This is your peace prize,” Infantino said at the glitzy, celebrity-studded ceremony at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center.

Infantino has repeatedly spoken about football as a unifier for the world, but the prize is a departure from the federation’s traditional focus on sport.

Critics pointed out that the recognition came less than 24 hours after the Trump administration carried out a deadly air strike in the Caribbean.

Two months later, the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran and hitting nuclear and military sites around the country.

The US-Israel war on Iran has gone on for months with Trump saying this week that he will not attack Iran again before the November 3 midterm elections in the US.

Why might FIFA scrap the award?

Several FIFA member nations demanded the discontinuation of the award during Thursday’s FIFA Council meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, according to reports in British media.

Others called for the prize to no longer be handed out to politicians.

As a result, FIFA’s 22-member Football Social Responsibility Committee was tasked with assessing the merits of the award. It is expected to make a recommendation before the next council meeting in Doha, Qatar, on December 16.

Debbie Hewitt, a FIFA vice president and president of the English Football Association, told the media at the council briefing that the committee “will consider, first of all, how the peace prize came about, whether it should have come about, whether it should have been awarded in the way that it was, who made that decision and whether or not it should be taken out or whether it should be reformed”.

What has FIFA said?

Al Jazeera has reached out to FIFA for comment and was referred to Infantino’s statement on it: “For the FIFA Peace Prize, it was decided that the Football Social Responsibility Committee will be tasked to analyse it, provide a proposal, and also, there, a decision will be taken at the next FIFA Council meeting.”

Has the FIFA Peace Prize faced opposition?

Yes.

In October, the Norwegian Football Association (NFF) made parallel filings with ⁠⁠FIFA committees in relation to three recent issues, one of which was related to the awarding of the FIFA Peace Prize.

“The purpose is ⁠⁠to raise these issues formally with the appropriate bodies, to have them examined, relevant evidence obtained and accountability for the conclusions reached,” the NFF said in a statement.

The NFF has repeatedly raised questions about the award, and in April, its president, Lise Klaveness, said FIFA should scrap its peace prize to avoid getting drawn into ⁠⁠politics.

“We want to see it abolished. We don’t think it’s part of FIFA’s mandate to give such a prize. We think we have a Nobel institute that does that job independently already,” Klaveness said.

Earlier, human rights group FairSquare filed a complaint with the FIFA Ethics Committee, accusing Infantino of breaching his duty of neutrality by supporting Trump.

‘Mockery’ of FIFA human rights policy

The criticism of the award isn’t limited to football associations.

In late April, Australia midfielder Jackson Irvine said football’s credibility as a force for good ⁠⁠has been undermined by FIFA, and he accused FIFA of making a mockery of its human rights policy.

“As an organisation, you would have to say decisions like the one that we saw awarding ⁠⁠this peace prize makes a mockery of what they’re trying to do with the human rights charter and trying to use football as a global driving force for good and positive change in the world,” Irvine told the Reuters news agency in an interview.

“Decisions like that feel like they just set us back in the perceived market of what football currently is, especially at the top level, where it’s becoming so disconnected from society and the grassroots of what the game actually is and means in our communities and in the world.”

Craig Mokhiber, a former United Nations official who has campaigned to suspend Israel from world football over its genocidal war in Gaza, called the award to Trump a “truly shameful development”.

Infantino has refused to take action against Israel, arguing that football “cannot solve geopolitical” issues.

“Not satisfied with two years of FIFA complicity in genocide in Palestine, Infantino and his cronies have now invented a new ‘peace prize’ in order to curry favour with Donald Trump,” Mokhiber told Al Jazeera.

He added that the award also aims to “obscure” Trump’s “disgraceful record” of support for Israel, his deadly strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and “gross violations of human rights” inside the US.

Growing pressure on Infantino

The scrutiny around the FIFA Peace Prize follows the recent backlash Infantino has faced.

Infantino has been under fire since his announcement in late July that he wanted to open FIFA’s premium competitions, such as the World Cup, to private investors.

That plan was ultimately abandoned in the face of widespread criticism with a rebellion led by the European governing body UEFA, the Asian Football Confederation and CONCACAF, which runs the sport in North and Central America and the Caribbean.

Infantino has headed FIFA since 2016 and is running for re-election in March despite calls for him to stand down in the wake of the $4.2bn plan to sell a 20 per cent commercial stake in the World Cup.

The Swedish academy says the academics’ models are ‘now used by central banks and ​governments around the world’.

The ⁠2026 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to US academics Robert Hall and Michael ⁠Woodford for their work on how monetary and fiscal policy can help stabilise fluctuations in the economy, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The winners of the prestigious award, formally known ⁠as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and the final prize to be given out this year, were announced on Monday.

The two laureates developed new macroeconomic models that improve people’s ability to implement effective stabilisation policies, enabling fiscal and monetary policy measures that can reduce damaging swings in the economy.

“The laureates’ work has provided us ‌with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,” John Hassler, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said in a statement.

“With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume.”

During the oil crises in the 1970s, the existing Keynesian models used to determine when and how measures should be implemented to tackle recessions or other economic fluctuations stopped working. Hall and Woodford then developed new tools to understand what policy responses could be the most effective.

“Rather than basing the models on statistical links between macroeconomic variables, such as inflation, production and consumption, they chose to build them on a microeconomic foundation,” the academy said. “This encompasses an understanding of how the total mass of individual households and businesses affect the economy through their actions.”

The economics prize, first awarded ⁠in 1969, is not part of the five original awards ⁠created in the 1895 will of industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, but was instead established by Sweden’s central bank.

The majority of previous laureates have been from the United States. Only three women have ⁠ever won, most recently Claudia Goldin in 2023 for her work on how gender has affected pay and employment over time ⁠in the US.

Last year’s winners – Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt – won for ‌their work on “creative destruction” and how new technology and production methods can boost growth and living standards.

Like the other Nobel awards, the economics prize consists of a diploma, a gold medal, and a $1.2m cheque.

The Nobel prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were announced last ‌week, with South African jurist Navi Pillay and Canadian writer Anne Carson among the winners.

Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, essayist, professor of classics and translator, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in literature.

The prize, announced at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday, awarded Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” Carson is the 19th woman to win.

Among Carson’s myriad acclaimed works are her novel in verse “Autobiography of Red” and its sequel, “Red Doc>”; her seminal book of literary criticism, “Eros the Bittersweet”; poetry collections such as “Glass, Irony, and God” — which contains “The Glass Essay” — and the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection of narrative poetry “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”; her haunting accordion-fold elegy, “Nox”; and her widely praised translation of Sappho’s surviving fragments, “If Not, Winter.”

“In 1981, she published her doctoral thesis in classics, and has throughout her entire career, combined poetry writing with translation work and teaching at various universities,” said Anders Olsson, who serves as the chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy, and presented the laureate. “Almost all her literary production has centered upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning.

“Throughout her entire authorship, Carson, with a light touch, explores the possibilities of writing, a process by which the literary sketch has become of particular value for her. In her collaborations with visual artists and choreographers, and with opera and theater directors, she has crossed over into various artistic fields, which has lent her writing a strongly performative aspect,” Olsson continued. “This demonstrates the freedom with which she relates to literary expectations and rule systems, which in turn lies behind the outstanding importance her work since the 1990s has had for the international art and literature scene.”

Nobel committee member Steve Sem-Sandberg said Carson is “an author for our time,” unique in her skill at connecting contemporary ways of living through antiquity. Sem-Sandberg marveled at Carson’s use of the myths, characters, stories and fables from that time, and the way she puts them into a modern context. “The mixture between those two gives an enormous energy to her writing,” he said. “Nobody writes like her, and nobody would even, I think, dare to do this in this way.”

Carson was sipping tea and eating crackers at her seaside home in Iceland — she also resides in Ann Arbor, Mich., where she teaches — after she got the big news. She said she was thinking of ways to give the 12 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million) award away. “We have a friend who needs a house, and we always give a lot to Doctors Without Borders,” she said. She also planned to celebrate by taking a walk through the woods and turning off the phone.

Carson’s initial reaction was surprise. “Who would expect it? For heaven’s sake!”