President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been nominated for the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for fighting terrorism and securing world peace, a Norwegian lawmaker announced yesterday.

Harald Tom Nesvik, a member of parliament from the right-wing Party of Progress, said he has nominated the two leaders who have been at the forefront of the war in Afghanistan.

"The background for my nomination is their decisive action against terrorism, something I believe in the future will be the greatest threat to peace," Nesvik said. "Unfortunately, sometimes ... you have to use force to secure peace."

Nesvik has nomination rights as a member of a national legislature.

The Oslo-based awards committee accepts nominations postmarked by Feb. 1, so proposals continue to arrive and a final number is not expected until late in the month.

Last year, 136 individuals and groups were nominated. The $943,000 prize was shared by the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan.

The committee keeps the names of nominees secret for 50 years. However, those making nominations often reveal their choice.

The Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States and the aftermath were expected to influence this year's nominations, because those events were too late to be considered in last year's award.

Other Sept. 11-related nominations mentioned, but not confirmed, include former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Guy Tozzoli, an engineer who helped design the World Trade Center.

Also yesterday, two Christian Democratic members of Norway's parliament announced their nomination of the Salvation Army, adding to a list that includes Rome-based Catholic group Church of Sant'Egidio for peace and humanitarian efforts and the Mission of Mercy humanitarian group for work in Latin America.

The Nobel Prize winners are named in mid-October and the awards are always presented on Dec. 10, the day their founder, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, died in 1896. The peace prize is awarded in Oslo, and the others in Stockholm, Sweden.

Princeton University has received a $30 million gift from the head of online auction house eBay and will use it to expand undergraduate enrollment for the first time since the Ivy League school began admitting women in 1969.

The donation from 1977 Princeton graduate Meg Whitman will go toward the construction of another residential college for underclassmen and the expansion of the student body by 10 percent, President Shirley M. Tilghman said.

All freshmen and sophomores live in one of Princeton's five residential colleges, which have libraries, coffeehouses and theaters.

The gift will go toward a sixth, Whitman College, which will provide space for about 500 students. Princeton now has about 4,600 undergraduates.

Whitman, who helped turn eBay into a global marketplace with 42 million registered users, serves on Princeton's board of trustees.

A rental car company was ordered to pay a local family $9.5 million for the death of an 11-year-old girl in a rollover accident caused by tread separation in a Firestone tire.

A Pima County Superior Court jury determined Friday that APS Rent-a-Car Inc. was negligent in the Feb. 20, 2000, accident that killed Arecili Naranjo.

The jury said 70 percent of its verdict was based upon the plaintiffs' claims of negligence and 30 percent upon claims of product liability.

The girl's family sued APS Rent-a-Car Inc. based on allegations that the company neglected to tell the family of a previous accident involving a van they rented for a trip to Los Angeles.

During the previous accident, the tread blew off the right front tire, almost causing the Chevy Astro van to hit a truck, said Steven Copple, the Naranjo family's lawyer.

The company replaced the tire and rented the van again.

The tire that caused this accident "wasn't worn out," Copple said. "It wasn't bald. When the first one went out, they (the rental car company) knew or should have known that the other tires had defects in them."

The tire was a Firestone F-570, not the same series as Firestone tires recalled from Ford Explorers.

The jury awarded the girl's father, Dionicio Naranjo, who was also hurt in the accident, $5.4 million for loss of his daughter, and physical and emotional injuries.

The girl's mother, Martha Naranjo, was awarded $3.5 million for the loss of her daughter and emotional injuries.