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 for The 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. “