1. Malala Yousafzai has gone to school today, writes Gordon Brown for The Daily Beast. Malala is the 15-year-old Pakistani girl shot execution-style by the Taliban on her school bus in Pakistan. Her heroic story of survival and courage has inspired people of every age around the world. Not even death threats stand in the way of Malala’s pursuit of an education, and her determination to inspire other girls to get an education, too. Malala is living now in England with her family. We all hope that she is safe there.

Gordon Brown reminds us that around the world today there are 32 million girls who will not be in school. Many live in Malala’s Swat Valley and still fight the Taliban to get an education. Of the 700,000 students in Pakistan’s Swat Valley not being educated, 600,000 are girls.

Brown reports that 500 million of today’s generation of young girls are unlikely to complete their schooling. Violence around their schools is a key reason. About 10 million girls each year will be forced into child marriages, their education finished. Read on for more very distressing facts on girls’ education worldwide.

2. Pakistan has arrested the Qari Abdul Hayee, a leader of the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the man believed to be one of the masterminds behind the beheading in 2002 of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It’s not the first time he’s been arrested and there is no confirmation that he will be charged in the death of the Jewish journalist.

Two key figures in Pearl’s death are already in prison, reports The New York Times. They are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Qaeda operational mastermind who designed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and who wielded the knife against Mr. Pearl; and Ahmed Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamic militant who lured Mr. Pearl to an interview and then kidnapped him.

Pearl’s death is a key reason why Anne of Carversville was born in 2007, as Anne read the details of Angelina Jolie’s upcoming documentary, which was a collaboration with Pearl’s widow, Mariane.

Smart Sensuality & Angelina Jolie: Virtue Considered in Carversville’s Country Air AOC Green

I drink my double espresso, reading Tom Junod’s thought-provoking article about Angelina Jolie in July Esquire. The topic is virtue … hers and ours … and the meaning of 9/11 in our celebrity-struck, American lives over five years later.

Jolie has worked tirelessly since 9/11 to make a difference. Have I?

3. A new generation of romance novel writers embrace feminism. ‘Bodice-rippers’ have never been on our reading list. Apparently there was a lot of raping going on back in the 1970s, as the hero who was a great deal older and more inclined to take his virgins as he chose, turned true-love hero in the heroine’s orbit. The word used by Jussica Luther writing forThe Atlantic is ‘rapetastic’.

In the 1970s, feminists were fighting patriarchy and the presumed rights of ‘rapetastic’ men, while romance novels propped it up. As rape has disappeared from the genre, feminism is not an ugly word.

“Dr. Jackie C. Horne, a writer, independent scholar, and author of the site Romance Novels for Feminists, says that the women who now write romance novels grew up enjoying the benefits of the feminist movement. “

Feminist romance authors frequently incorporate problems in romance fiction that are unexpected to the mostly conservative readers. The results can be jarring, although many writers like the tension. Not only do feminist heroines make choices, they also assume significant responsibility for their lives. Feminism isn’t proclaimed, rather it’s lived by a younger generation not so titillated by reformed rapists as their mothers or grandmothers.

4. Ohio lawmakers propose legislation to create a trust fund to provide services to sexual assault victims. In the aftermath of a guilty verdict in the Steubenville High School football rape scandal, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine(R) says that 52 of Ohio’s 88 counties do not provide services to rape victims. Two Republican representatives will introduce legislation to provide support to victims in underserved communities, reports theNew York Daily News.

“There are many gaps,” said Katie Hanna, executive director of the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence. “There needs to be an investment in existing services so they have dedicated funding as well as new services in counties where these programs don’t exist.”

A day after Sunday’s guilty verdict, two Ohio girls suspected of making social media threats against the accuser were arrested. The Steubenville case is far from over. A grand jury will meet in April to consider evidence about what other teens, parents, school officials and coaches knew about the assault.

“Text messages introduced at trial suggested the head coach was aware of the rape allegation early on. Reno Saccoccia “took care of it,” defendant Trent Mays said in one text introduced by prosecutors.”

The Makino family. Photo by Julie Blackmon.Timed with the national conversation around Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s progressive values book ‘Lean In’, New York Magazine decided to play the contrarian with their cover story ‘The Retro Wife’.

The facts are well known by now. Feminism is sort of a fizzle. Even though American women are better educated than ever, the push and pull of child rearing means that few reach the corner office. They are granted fewer responsibilities at work and have made little progress in being elected to office.

“The number of stay-at-home mothers rose incrementally between 2010 and 2011, for the first time since the downturn of 2008. While staying home with children remains largely a privilege of the affluent (the greatest number of America’s SAHMs live in families with incomes of $100,000 a year or more), some of the biggest increases have been among younger mothers, ages 25 to 35, and those whose family incomes range from $75,000 to $100,000 a year.”

In New York City, there was a 10% increase in home schooling among progressives. Not only the Christian right supports home schooling these days.