As millions mark Malala Day, we must take this opportunity to guarantee access to education for all young girls by 2015. Gordon Brown on the organizations taking steps to make that a reality—and how you can help.

The father of a teenage girl who was shot by the Pakistani Taliban said he is grateful for the world’s prayers, but wants to focus on his daughter’s recuperation.

Following the Taliban’s failed attempt to murder Malala Yousafzai, another teenage girl has been threatened for campaigning for female education.

By Rob Crilly

A second teenage girl has been threatened with assassination in Pakistan following the Taliban’s failed attempt to murder Malala Yousafzai, an outspoken critic of Islamic extremism, earlier this month.

Hina Khan has been subjected to a series of chilling warnings, and her family has appealed to the government for protection. Like Malala, Hina Khan is from Swat and has been campaigning for girls schools since she was 13.

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Shehrbano Taseer takes an insider's look at the 15-year-old girl who may finally turn the tide on extremism.

The teenage girls chatted to each other and their teachers as the school bus rattled along the country road. Students from a girls’ high school in Swat, they had just finished a term paper, and their joy was evident as they broke into another Pashto song. About a mile outside the city of Mingora, two men flagged down and boarded the bus, one of them pulling out a gun. “Which one of you is Malala Yousafzai?” he demanded. No one spoke—some out of loyalty, others out of fear. But, unconsciously, their eyes turned to Malala. “That’s the one,” the gunman said, looking the 15-year-old girl in the face and pulling the trigger twice, shooting her in the head and neck. He fired twice more, wounding two other girls, and then both men fled the scene.

Over the screams and tears of the girls, a teacher instructed the bus driver to drive to a local hospital a few miles away. She stared in horror at Malala’s body, bleeding profusely and slumped unconscious in her friend’s lap, then closed her eyes and started to pray.

As of this writing, Malala fights for her life at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England. Her would-be killers have not yet been caught. But it’s clear who bears responsibility. And in the days since the Oct. 9 assault on her, sadness, fury, and indignation have swept the world.

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University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust / AP Photo

Doctors warn 14-year-old is “still very ill.”

Doctors in the British hospital where young Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai is being treated for gunshot wounds said on Friday that she is steadily recovering. Having come out of a medically induced coma, she is now able to write and stand up on her own and has indicated that she has retained her full memory. However, Yousafzai is "still very ill," according to the hospital, and doctors warn that due to swelling, her brain injury has not been fully evaluated. Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban last week, targeted for her efforts to improve girls’ education.

Read it at The New York Times

Philippe Lopez

Communicating through writing; not talking yet.

Having come out of a coma yesterday, Malala Yousafzai is “not out of the woods,” doctors told Reuters on Friday. The 14-year-old is able to communicate through writing and appears to have maintained memory recall, and she stood up for the first time since she was shot in the head by the Taliban last week and then flown to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in England for treatment. The hospital’s medical director said she is not talking yet because she’s still recovering from a procedure that allowed her to breathe through a tube in her neck.

Read it at Reuters

Pakistan authorities announced that a suspected Taliban member named Ataullah—who had been detained and released by the Army in 2009—is thought to be behind the attack on the 14-year-old activist.

It’s been almost two weeks since Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old peace activist from Pakistan’s Swat Valley, was shot in cold blood for daring to defy the Taliban’s archaic beliefs. More than 200 people have been arrested in the case, and subsequently released, but law enforcement has struggled to positively identify the men who attacked the young girl—until now.

Two senior officials announced that a man suspected of attacking Malala—who goes by the name of Ataullah—had been captured by the Army back in 2009 as a suspected Taliban member, but was released due to “lack of evidence.” However, they added, steps are being taken to bring him back into custody—including, one official said, the detention of his mother and two brothers. Two other relatives, who are suspected of having helped Attaullah hide as he fled Swat, have also been arrested, according to the officials.

On Oct. 9, two gunmen stopped Malala’s school bus and asked the girls aboard to identify her. Upon confirmation, they opened fire, hitting her in the head and shoulder and injuring two other girls. Malala is currently undergoing specialized treatment at a London hospital; neither she nor her friends have been able to identify the attackers.

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Twenty-one-year-old Afghan activist Noorjahan Akbar says the Taliban’s shooting of schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai only strengthens the fight for girls’ rights.

The news that the Taliban gunned down a schoolgirl last week shocked the world, but not a young woman named Noorjahan Akbar. The 21-year-old Akbar has been leading a fight for women’s rights in Afghanistan—and she’s quite familiar with seeing women in her region get targeted for “crimes” such as seeking an education, refusing a forced marriage, or fleeing an abusive husband. Akbar, the cofounder of a nonprofit group called Young Women for Change, has been instrumental in organizing trailblazing efforts such as the first Afghan march against street harassment, radio campaigns about gender equality, and street posters against child marriage and abuse. This year, her group opened a women’s Internet café in Kabul, providing a place for women to gather and share ideas.

Akbar, currently studying at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, is quick to admit that her activism puts her at risk. Still, she soldiers on. This past spring, she joined Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on stage at Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Summit, and she blogs for Afghan websites, boldly speaking up for women. Here, she describes what the Taliban’s shooting of 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai means for her own work.

What’s the reaction among young women in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the shooting?

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Arif Ali, AFP / Getty Images

But is not yet fully conscious.

Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban last week, is no longer in a coma, New York Times reporter Adam Ellick  said on Facebook on Wednesday. According to Ellick, Yousafzai is responding well to treatment and has a good chance of fully recovering, although she is not fully conscious yet. Yousafzai is being treated in a Birmingham combat hospital that has treated every single British casualty of both of the wars of the past decade. Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley after she called for more education for girls on her BBC blog.

Read it at Atlantic Wire

I told my kids—and you should too: Girls’ education is under threat in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and around the world. It’s time we all took a stand. By Angelina Jolie. Plus: Here’s how you can help.

On Wednesday morning, as we readied the kids for school amidst a few of the usual complaints about not wanting to go, I saw a headline on the cover of The New York Times: Taliban Gun Down a Girl Who Spoke Up for Rights. The Taliban claimed that 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai “ignored their warnings, and she left them no choice.” They approached her school bus, asking for her by name, and shot her in the head for promoting girls’ education.

After reading the article, I felt compelled to share Malala’s story with my children. It was difficult for them to comprehend a world where men would try to kill a child whose only “crime” was the desire that she and others like her be allowed to go to school.

Malala’s story stayed with them throughout the day, and that night they were full of questions. We learned about Malala together, watching her interviews and reading her diaries. Malala was just 11 years old when she began blogging for the BBC. She wrote of life under the Taliban, of trading in her school uniform for colorless plain clothes, of hiding books under her shawl, and eventually having to stop going to school entirely. 

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Niranjan Shrestha / AP Photo

As she arrives in Britain for treatment.

Malala Yousafzai, 14, who was shot in the head by Taliban insurgents targeting her, arrived on Monday at a British hospital, where doctors said she has every chance to make a “good recovery.” Pakistani surgeons removed a bullet from near her spinal cord during a three-hour operation last week the day after she was shot, but she now needs intensive follow-up care. She is now at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital, a center in Birmingham that has treated every British battle casualty for the last decade. Yousafzai was targeted by the Taliban for “promoting secularism.”

Read it at Reuters

As Malala Yousafzai lands in Britain, still fighting for her life, militants complain that coverage of the schoolgirl’s shooting has been ‘biased’ against them.

Malala Yousafzai has taken one more step in her very long and difficult journey. Separated from her family for now, the 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl arrived today at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Britain’s primary receiving facility for military casualties returning from overseas. Doctors say she still has not regained consciousness since being shot in the head by a Pakistani Taliban gunman who forced his way into a van full of schoolgirls, asked for her by name, and opened fire.

The attack has provoked unprecedented levels of public outrage, both in Pakistan and Afghanistan—even among people who have in the past sympathized with the militants. “First of all, attempting to kill a 14-year-old girl is a low act,” says Mullah Yahya, who was a high-ranking Afghan Information Ministry official back in the 1990s, when Mullah Mohammed Omar’s regime was in power. “Second, claiming responsibility for it is a sign that the [Pakistani] Taliban are not aware of the media’s importance. I have seen more anger against the religious elements in the past week than in all my 40 years of life.” Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, says the government has posted a $1 million bounty on Ehsanullah Ehsan, the Pakistani Taliban spokesman who claimed responsibility for the shooting.

So how are the Pakistani Taliban responding to so much public condemnation? By declaring war on individual journalists and the media, of course. “For days and days, coverage of the Malala case has shown clearly that the Pakistani and international media are biased,” says a Pakistani Taliban commander in South Waziristan. “The Taliban cannot tolerate biased media.” The commander, who calls himself Jihad Yar, argues that death threats against the press are justified: he says “99 percent” of the reporters on the story are only using the shooting as an excuse to attack the Taliban.

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Aamir Qureshi, AFP / Getty Images

Taliban victim to receive “prolonged care.”

Teenager Malala Yousafzai was airlifted to Britain on Monday to receive “prolonged treatment” one week after being shot in the head by the Taliban. Pakistani doctors decided to send Yousafzai abroad for care because of the extent of her injuries and the length of time her recovery may take. She was transported out of the country aboard a special air ambulance that arrived in Pakistan from the United Arab Emirates. Doctors said they decided to transport her Monday “during this time window whilst her condition was optimal and before any unforeseen complication had set in.”

Read it at The Hindu

First the Taliban shot 14-year-old Malala. Now they’re attacking her campaign for women’s education. Former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown on why we should be furious—and champion the cause she’s so bravely fighting for.

Less than a week after 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban for demanding the right to go to school, the Taliban have issued yet another threat of violence against her and her supporters.

By denigrating Malala’s campaign for women’s education as “an obscenity,” the Taliban have provoked worldwide revulsion that has now led to a global petition demanding new rights for girls. In the last few days Pakistan has seen a prayer day, a lawyers strike, and hundreds of “chains of hope” formed in city-by-city support of Malala.

Political and military leaders have flocked to Malala’s bedside. And I have just been invited by the Pakistani government in my role as U.N. special envoy for global education to bring a delegation of education leaders to meet President Asif Ali Zadari on Nov. 10 to discuss how Pakistan can achieve education for all. Demonstrations for Malala have spread out of Pakistan—not just to Bangladesh, India, and Afghanistan, but around the world. Offers of support have poured in to guarantee not only schooling but also security to Pakistani girls like Malala, so that they are no longer deprived of their right to education.

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Asif Hassan, AFP / Getty Images

Source: Limited chance of recovery.

The United Arab Emirates sent an air ambulance to aid the teenage Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban Sunday. A source told Al Jazeera that 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who has drawn the attention of the world, may have “very limited” chances of making a recovery. UAE medics say they will evacuate Yousafzai if doctors deem it necessary for treatment. The girl was shot in the head by the Taliban along with two classmates on the way home from school.

Read it at The Associated Press