Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the United States and US-Australian Brian Schmidt won the 2011 Nobel Physics Prize Tuesday for their research on supernovae, the Nobel jury said.

“They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate,” it said.

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SIRTE, Libya – Bullet-ridden cars carrying terrified, ill and hungry civilians crawled out of Muammar Qadhafis home town on Tuesday as anti-Qadhafi fighters said they were planning a final attack.

Government forces who had for three weeks been pinned down by artillery and rocket fire on the eastern edges of Sirte were able to advance several kilometers into the city on Monday, capturing the southern district of Bouhadi.

Commanders of forces loyal to the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) are now talking of a ‘final’ huge push to take the town as, backed by NATO warplanes, they continue their bombardment of pro-Qadhafi positions inside.

Aid agencies say they are concerned about the welfare of civilians inside Sirte, one of the last pro-Qadhafi bastions left in the country, who are trapped by the fighting and running out of food, water, fuel and medicine.

Concerns about the humanitarian crisis have focused on the Ibn Sina hospital. Medical workers who fled Sirte said patients were dying on the operating table because there was no oxygen and no fuel for the hospitals generators.

‘Its a disaster,’ a doctor who gave her name as Nada told Reuters as she fled the city on Tuesday. ‘They are hitting the hospital. Two kids have died there. There is random shooting at the hospital from both sides.’

On the east of the city on Tuesday, NTC fighters said they were trying to clear a corridor to the hospital but that they were being hampered by pro-Qadhafi snipers.

Qadhafis spokesman, and some civilians leaving Sirte, have blamed NATO bombing and NTC shelling for killing civilians and destroying buildings in the town.

NATO and the NTC say it is pro-Qadhafi fighters who are the biggest threat to civilians, saying loyalist forces have been executing those they believe to be NTC sympathizers and forcing others to fight.

Red Cross workers have managed to deliver supplies to Ibn Sina in recent days and a spokesman for the organization in Geneva confirmed that they had seen damage.

A Red Cross convoy delivered oxygen and other urgently needed medical supplies to the hospital on Monday after an earlier attempt was aborted because of heavy fighting.

‘The situation on the ground was very tense with ongoing fighting,’ Red Cross delegate Hichem Khadraoui said.

‘Under such conditions, we had to limit ourselves – after obtaining clearances from all the parties concerned – to bringing in the most urgently needed humanitarian aid.’

Civilians driving out of the town on Tuesday looked in poorer condition than people had in previous days, Reuters journalists on the east and west of Sirte said.

Several people said that they were ill and one man showed how he now needed string to hold up his trousers because he had not had enough to eat in the last three weeks.

Ali Durgham, leaving the city with several relatives, told Reuters that his father had been killed by a shell when he went to the mosque on Monday and that his uncle was seriously injured.

‘My father died in my arms,’ he said, weeping heavily, as his mother watched. ‘I buried him yesterday.’

Medical staff outside Sirte who had treated wounded civilians fleeing the fighting said they had been told the corridors of Ibn Sina were full of patients and that treatment was being given only to pro-Qadhafi fighters or members of his tribe.

A military spokesman for the interim government, the National Transitional Council, told a television channel that Qadhafis son Mutassim was hiding in the hospital.

‘Our revolutionaries (in Sirte) are fighting those who are accomplices of the tyrant in crimes against the Libyan people,’ Ahmed Bani told Doha-based Libya TV.

‘They are a group of killers and mercenaries led by Mutassim Qadhafi who is now in the Ibn Sina hospital in Sirte to avoid being hit, according to newly received information.’

Libyans ended Qadhafis 42-year rule in August when rebel fighters stormed the capital. Qadhafi and several of his sons are still at large and his supporters hold Sirte and the town of Bani Walid, south of Tripoli.

De facto Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said on Monday the NTC would set in motion the process of democratic elections once Sirte was captured, instead of waiting until the whole country is under their control.

Jibril told a news conference in the city of Benghazi: ‘Bani Walid would be dealt with as a renegade region.’

A city of about 75,000 people, Sirte holds symbolic importance. Qadhafi transformed his birthplace from a sleepy fishing town into Libyas second capital.

  France and Sweden on Tuesday warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime against attacking or intimidating Syrian opposition in exile, amid reports of assaults and threats in European capitals.

Global rights watchdog Amnesty International said Syrian pro-democracy activists had been harrassed in eight countries, as France confirmed it had launched an investigation after thugs attacked a protest in Paris.

A foreign ministry spokesman said arrests had been made and extra police protection assigned to Syrian opposition protests after the August 26 attack.

“We would not tolerate a foreign state organising acts of violence or intimidation on our territory, and we have made this known in the clearest possible terms to Syria’s ambassador in Paris,” Bernard Valero said.

“The right to protest freely and peacefully in safety is fully guaranteed by the French constitution, and it is also obvious that France supports the Syrian people’s hopes for freedom,” he said.

“An inquiry is under way, and we hope that it will come quickly to an conclusion,” he added.

According to the French daily Le Monde, a small group of Syrian protesters that gathers regularly in a square in central Paris has been insulted, filmed and on at least one occasion violently attacked by thugs.

Valero confirmed that there had been arrests after one such incident on August 26, but denied a report in the Le Monde that suggested that two of the suspects were carrying Syrian diplomatic papers.

In Sweden, meanwhile, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt warned that: “If there are diplomats who engage in activities in this country that are not compatible with their diplomatic status they are not welcome in Sweden.”

Earlier, Amnesty International said it had documented cases of attacks and intimidation against 30 activists in eight countries: Britain, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the United States.

It urged countries hosting Syrians, like France and Sweden which have become hubs of opposition activity, to “take stronger action against Syrian embassies accused of orchestrating this kind of harassment and intimidation.”

Amnesty’s Syria researcher Neil Sammonds said Syrians living abroad are becoming increasingly vocal in their support of the growing protest movement back home that has been demanding Assad step down.

“In response the regime appears to have waged a systematic — sometimes violent — campaign to intimidate Syrians overseas into silence,” he said.

Amnesty said protesters outside Syrian embassies are initially filmed or photographed by officials then subjected to harassment, including phone calls, emails and Facebook messages warning them to stop.

Some activists say they were directly threatened by embassy officials.

Naima Darwish, who set up a Facebook page to call for protests outside the Syrian embassy in Santiago, Chile, told the rights group she was contacted directly by a senior official who asked to meet her in person.

“He told me that I should not to do such things,” she told Amnesty. “He said I would lose the right to return to Syria if I continued.”

A number of Syrians said their families back home were targeted by security forces, apparently to deter them from their activities overseas.

After Malek Jandali, a 38-year-old pianist, performed at a demonstration in front of the White House in July, his mother and father, aged 66 and 73, were attacked in their home in the central city of Homs and have since fled Syria.

“We look to host governments to act on credible allegations of abuses,” said Sammonds, adding many dissidents were often “too scared of what could happen to them to make formal complaints with the police.”

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