Members of the Pussy Riot punk band were announced candidates for Time Magazine’s 2012 Person of the Year. The women can find their names next to US President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy, and Olympic champion Michael Phelps. “In a year when so many voices of liberty and dissent have suffered harsh retribution, the Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot has paid a particularly steep price for provocative political expression,” the magazine wrote about the nominee. Two of the members were given two years in jail for a February 2012 performance in Moscow’s main cathedral denouncing the Russian Orthodox Church’s support of President Vladimir Putin, the magazine reminds. At the same time a poll shows that 70 percent of people do not share Time’s decision and think the notorious punk band members do not deserve the award. Among the 38 candidates one can find inanimate objects, the Higgs Boson, for instance. “It was in the 1960s that Scottish physicist Peter Higgs first posited the existence of a particle that causes energy to make the jump to matter. But it was not until last summer that a team of researchers at Europe's Large Hadron Collider — Rolf Heuer, Joseph Incandela and Fabiola Gianotti — at last sealed the deal and in so doing finally fully confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity,” Time noted. Another candidate is the Mars Curiosity rover. At the moment Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy is leading as he has received support of 47 thousand online voters. “His and his party's electoral victory this summer heralded a new moment for the Arab world's most populous nation, so long kept underfoot by the Western-backed authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak,” Time wrote. In previous years Time selected Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, US President Barack Obama, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as the award’s winners. In 2007 the magazine’s editors selected Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. In mid December editors of the magazine will name this year's winner. Meanwhile anyone can vote online for the person he/she considers as the person who influenced most the news this year for better or worse on the magazine’s website. Source: Voice of Russia
