Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie introduced the audience at last week’s Women in the World Summit to very personal stories about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head by the Taliban who stopped her school bus and asked which of the girls was the blogger Malala.

Vital Voices, with a donation from the Women in the World Foundation, established the Malala Fund, to be directed by the 15-year-old. Malala announced the first grant to educate 40 girls in her home district in the Swat Valley.

After Jolie, who is the special enjoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, left the stage, conference organizer Tina Brown announced that the actress had recently donated $200,000 to the fund. Jolie has started her own project to fund girls’ schools in particular, with proceeds from her jewelry collection Style by Jolie jewelry collaboration with Robert Procop.

1. 25-year-old US diplomat Anne Smedinghoff died in an attack in Afghanistan on Saturday. The young diplomat had volunteered to deliver books to a school in southern Afghanistan.

US Secretary of State John Kerry met Smedinghoff on his recent trip to Afghanistan and spoke of her today.

“The folks who want to kill people, and that’s all they want to do, are scared of knowledge. And they want to shut the doors and they don’t want people to make their choices about the future. For them, it’s ‘You do things my way and if you don’t, we’ll throw acid in your face. We’ll put a bullet in your face,’ to a young girl trying to learn,” Kerry said. “So this is a huge challenge for us. It is a confrontation with modernity, with possibilities, and everything that our country stands for, everything we stand for, is embodied in what Anne Smedinghoff stood for.”

The young diplomat graduated from John Hopkins University in 2009 with a degree in international relations. She joined the Foreign Service shortly afterward. via CNN

2. In another piece of great news for girls, Madonna is set to sell her painting ‘Trois Femmes à la Table Rouge’, a 1921 painting by Fernand Léger at Sotheby’s in New York on May 7th. Proceeds from the sale estimated to fetch $5-$7 million will be used for girls’ education.

“I have a great passion for art and a great passion for education,’’ she said in a statement announcing the sale. “In conjunction with Sotheby’s I would like to share these two passions,’’ adding that “I cannot accept a world where women or girls are wounded, shot or killed for either going to school or teaching in girls’ schools.’’