When the Pakistani Taleban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head, their message to the world was simple: Girls have no right to an education and their dreams of a better future should be crushed.
The attack portrayed the world’s only Muslim nuclear power in an appalling light as Western leaders and celebrities fell over themselves to turn Malala into a global icon of child rights.
But as she gears up to address the UN General Assembly on Friday — her 16th birthday — more girls than ever in Malala’s home, Pakistan’s northwestern Swat valley, are in school.
In the first six months of the current year, 102,374 girls registered at primary schools in Swat — compared to a total of 96,540 during all of last year, said Dilshad Bibi, Swat district education officer.
Educationalists say the influx has less to do with Malala’s fame and more to do with a growing confidence that far from being resurgent, Taleban influence is declining in Swat.
“Many people think that Malala has nothing to do with the increase in girl students in schools,” said Erfaan Hussein Babak, head teacher of a private school in the town of Saidu Sharif.
“It is because of a general awareness among the masses that girls should also be educated,” he told AFP.
“There are many other girls who worked for education and continued their studies under the Taleban. They think that Malala was wrongly promoted by the media and was falsely hyped,” he said.
Anwar Sultana, headmistress of Government Girls High School No. 1, the oldest in Mingora, the main town in Swat, agrees.
“Many students were actually scared when the government named a college after Malala,” she said.
Last December, around 150 girls at another school protested against the renaming of their college after the injured schoolgirl, fearing it would make them a target for militants.
Malala has been nominated for the Nobel Peace prize and now being privately educated in Britain.
Sultana says more girls are going to school now not because of Malala, but because people feel increasingly liberated as more time passes since the Pakistan Army quashed a 2007-9 Taleban insurgency in the valley.
“Whenever you suppress something, it appears with more freedom,” Sultana told AFP, sitting on a verandah as girls in long white shirts and baggy trousers poured out of congested classrooms.
“Now more and more girls are joining schools, which means the fear is over,” Sultana said.
At Sultana’s school, there are no desks and chairs in the dark brown, grey and orange colored classrooms. Instead the girls sit on the floor to pack a maximum number into each room.
Saeeda Rahim, 13, is one of those girls. The Taleban stopped her and thousands of other girls from going to school between 2007 and 2009. When the army offensive came in 2009, she and her family were forced to flee for their safety.
Displaced for three months, she spent much of the time in tears, her dreams of getting an education and becoming a doctor in tatters.
“Those days were the most difficult of my life. I lost hope and courage. I had no energy to read. I thought I’d never be able to study again,” she told AFP.
When her family returned home, her mother initially refused to let her go back to school, fearing that she could be attacked.
Now, she is back at Government High School No 1. She covers her face with a white veil, wears the pink strip of a prefect — and says she takes inspiration from Malala.
“I really like her speeches. I want to continue her work, I want to appear in the media and convince parents that education is a right for their daughters,” she said.
There is certainly a long way to go.
Throughout Pakistan, nearly half of all children and nearly three quarters of young girls are not enrolled in primary school, according to UN and government statistics published late last year. In Malala’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, only 36 percent of women and 72 percent of men are literate, according to the government. Muhammad Atif, the provincial education minister, says militants have destroyed 750 schools since 2008, of which 611 have been reconstructed.
The new provincial government, led by the party of former cricketer Imran Khan, has increased its annual education budget by 27 percent and declared female education its priority.
“Our government has allocated 66 billion rupees ($ 660 million), the highest amount in the provincial budget for education, and female education is our top priority,” said Atif.
Swat girls throng to school as Malala addresses UN
Swat girls throng to school as Malala addresses UN
Japan awards longest-serving death row inmate $1.4 million
- Payout represents 12,500 yen ($83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention
- The former boxer was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others
TOKYO: A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded $1.4 million in compensation, an official said Tuesday.
The payout represents 12,500 yen ($83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last.
It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said.
The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others.
The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in Japan, where gaining a retrial is notoriously hard and death row inmates are often informed of their impending death just a few hours before they are hanged.
The Shizuoka District Court, in a decision dated Monday, said that “the claimant shall be granted 217,362,500 yen ($1.44 million),” a court spokesman told AFP.
The same court ruled in September that Hakamada was not guilty in a retrial and that police had tampered with evidence.
Hakamada had suffered “inhumane interrogations meant to force a statement (confession)” that he later withdrew, the court said at the time.
Hakamada’s legal team said the money falls short of the pain he suffered between his 1966 arrest and his release in 2014, when he was granted a retrial.
“I think the fact that he will receive it... compensates him a little bit for all the hardship,” lawyer Hideyo Ogawa told a press conference.
“But in light of the hardship and suffering of the past 47 or 48 years, and given his current situation, I think it shows that the state has made mistakes that cannot be atoned for with 200 million yen,” he said.
Decades of detention – with the threat of execution constantly looming – took a major toll on Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers have said, describing him as “living in a world of fantasy.”
Hakamada was convicted of robbing and killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.
He initially denied the charges but police said Hakamada eventually confessed.
During his trial, Hakamada claimed innocence, saying that his confession was forced.
More than a year after the killings, investigators said they found blood-stained clothes – a key piece of evidence that the court later said was planted by investigators.
Hakamada now lives with his sister with help from supporters.
Hakamada was the fifth death row inmate granted a retrial in Japan’s post-war history. All four previous cases also resulted in exonerations.
Japan is the only major industrialized democracy other than the United States to retain capital punishment, a policy that has broad public support.
Japan’s justice minister said in October that abolishing the death penalty would be “inappropriate” even after Hakamada’s acquittal.
Stressed? Sick? Swiss town lets doctors prescribe free museum visits as art therapy for patients
- Dr. Marc-Olivier Sauvain, head of surgery at the Neuchatel Hospital Network, said he had already prescribed museum visits to two patients to help them get in better shape before a planned operation
NEUCHATEL, Switzerland: The world’s woes got you down? Feeling burnout at work? Need a little something extra to fight illness or prep for surgery? The Swiss town of Neuchâtel is offering its residents a novel medical option: Expose yourself to art and get a doctor’s note to do it for free.
Under a new two-year pilot project, local and regional authorities are covering the costs of “museum prescriptions” issued by doctors who believe their patients could benefit from visits to any of the town’s four museums as part of their treatment.
The project is based on a 2019 World Health Organization report that found the arts can boost mental health, reduce the impact of trauma and lower the risk of cognitive decline, frailty and “premature mortality,” among other upsides.
Art can help relax the mind — as a sort of preventative medicine — and visits to museums require getting up and out of the house with physical activity like walking and standing for long periods.
Neuchatel council member Julie Courcier Delafontaine said the COVID crisis also played a role in the program’s genesis. “With the closure of cultural sites (during coronavirus lockdowns), people realized just how much we need them to feel better.”
She said so far some 500 prescriptions have been distributed to doctors around town and the program costs “very little.” Ten thousand Swiss francs (about $11,300) have been budgeted for it.
If successful, local officials could expand the program to other artistic activities like theater or dance, Courcier Delafontaine said. The Swiss national health care system doesn’t cover “culture as a means of therapy,” but she hopes it might one day, if the results are positive enough.
Marianne de Reynier Nevsky, the cultural mediation manager in the town of 46,000 who helped devise the program, said it built on a similar idea rolled out at the Fine Arts Museum in Montreal, Canada, in 2019.
She said many types of patients could benefit.
“It could be a person with depression, a person who has trouble walking, a person with a chronic illness,” she said near a display of a feather headdress from Papua New Guinea at the Ethnographic Museum of Neuchatel, a converted former villa that overlooks Late Neuchatel.
Part of the idea is to get recalcitrant patients out of the house and walking more.
Dr. Marc-Olivier Sauvain, head of surgery at the Neuchatel Hospital Network, said he had already prescribed museum visits to two patients to help them get in better shape before a planned operation.
He said a wider rollout is planned once a control group is set up. For his practice, the focus will be on patients who admit that they’ve lost the habit of going out. He wants them to get moving.
“It’s wishful thinking to think that telling them to go walk or go for a stroll to improve their fitness level before surgery” will work, Sauvain said on a video call Saturday, wearing blue scrubs. “I think that these patients will fully benefit from museum prescriptions. We’ll give them a chance to get physical and intellectual exercise.”
“And as a doctor, it’s really nice to prescribe museum visits rather than medicines or tests that patients don’t enjoy,” he added. “To tell them ‘It’s a medical order that instructs you to go visit one of our nice city museums.’”
Some museum-goers see the upsides too.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Carla Fragniere Filliger, a poet and retired teacher, during a visit to the ethnography museum. “There should be prescriptions for all the museums in the world!”
Paris residents vote in favor of making 500 more streets pedestrian
- The referendum will eliminate 10,000 more parking spots in Paris, adding to the 10,000 removed since 2020
- Last year, Parisians voted to triple parking charges for large SUVs. A 2023 vote approved a ban on e-scooters
PARIS: Parisians voted in a referendum on Sunday to pedestrianize a further 500 of the city’s streets, giving fresh momentum to efforts by the French capital’s left-leaning town hall to curb car usage and improve air quality.
Some 65.96 percent of Parisians voted in favor of the measure, while 34.04 percent rejected it, official results showed. Only 4.06 percent of voters turned out in the consultation, which was organized by the municipality.
This was the third such referendum in Paris in as many years, following a 2023 vote that approved a ban on e-scooters, and a decision last year to triple parking charges for large SUVs.
The referendum will eliminate 10,000 more parking spots in Paris, adding to the 10,000 removed since 2020. The city’s two million residents will be consulted on which streets will become pedestrian areas.
Paris town hall data shows car traffic in the city has more than halved since the Socialists took power in the capital at the turn of the century.
The 500 additional streets to be pedestrianized will bring the total number of these so-called “green lungs” to nearly 700, just over one-tenth of the capital’s streets.
Despite recent changes, Paris lags other European capitals in terms of green infrastructure — which include private gardens, parks, tree-lined streets, water and wetlands — making up only 26 percent of the city area versus a European capitals average of 41 percent, according to the European Environment Agency.
Quirky livestream that lets viewers help fish is a hit with millions
- When viewers see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through
- Letting the fish through help them make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds
UTRECHT, Netherlands: The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a ” fish doorbell ” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds.
The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a website. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through.
Now in its fifth year, the site has attracted millions of viewers from around the world with its quirky mix of slow TV and ecological activism.
Much of the time, the screen is just a murky green with occasional bubbles, but sometimes a fish swims past. As the water warms up, more fish show up.
Without the help, native freshwater fish like bream, pike and bass can become backed up behind the lock and form easy prey for predators in the spring, when the lock is rarely opened for passing boats.
The bell is the brainchild of ecologist and concept developer Mark van Heukelum. He’s been happily surprised at the response, with millions of people from around the world tuning in over the years.
“I guess the combination of a good cause, a beautiful story and just a simple idea generates all this attention,” he said.
Anna Nijs, an ecologist with Utrecht municipality, was also amazed at the popularity of the concept around the world.
“We get a lot of fan mail from people who think it’s slow TV and they find it relaxing,” said Nijs. Besides, “they appreciate that they can actually do something to help.”
Spain reverses ban on hunting wolves in north
- An amendment stipulates that capture and killing of wolves may be 'justified' in the event of a threat to the Spanish agricultural production
- Conservation group Ecologists in Action called the reversal of the hunting ban 'irresponsible'
MADRID: Spanish lawmakers on Thursday voted to end a ban on hunting wolves in the north of the country, three years after its introduction by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s minority leftist government.
Spain declared Iberian wolves living north of the Douro river a protected species in 2021, extending an existing hunting ban that was in place in the south over the objections of farmers who argued that it would lead to more attacks on their livestock.
Controlled hunting of the species had been allowed until then in the region which includes Asturias, Cantabria, Castile and Leon, and Galicia where the vast majority of the country’s Iberian wolves live.
The reversal of the hunting ban was introduced via an amendment to a law on food waste and approved with the votes of lawmakers from the conservative main opposition Popular Party (PP), far-right Vox, Basque regional party PNV and Catalan separatists JxCat.
The amendment introduced by the PP stipulates that the capture and killing of wolves may be “justified” in the event of a threat to the Spanish “productive system,” namely agricultural production.
It removes the wolf from a list of wild species under “special protection” north of the Douro.
Conservation group Ecologists in Action called the reversal of the hunting ban “irresponsible” while animal rights party PACMA described it as “the biggest step backwards in wildlife conservation in years.”
Members of the Bern Convention, tasked with the protection of wildlife in Europe and some African countries, in December agreed to lower the wolf’s protection status from “strictly protected” to “protected.”
Grey wolves were virtually exterminated in Europe 100 years ago but their numbers have rebounded since then to the current population of 20,300, mostly in the Balkans, Nordic countries, Italy and Spain.
