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Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Malala Yousafzai: A 'Normal,' Yet Powerful Girl
"I think Malala is an average girl," Ziauddin Yousafzai says about the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who captured the world's attention after being shot by the Taliban, "but there's something extraordinary about her."
A teacher himself, he inspired his daughter's fight to be educated. At a special event with Malala in Washington, he tells NPR's Michel Martin that he is often asked what training he gave to his daughter. "I usually tell people, 'you should not ask me what I have done, rather you ask me, what I did not do,'" he explains. "I did not clip her wings to fly. I did not stop her from flying.'"
Yousafzai has this advice for parents of girls around the world: "Trust your daughters, they are faithful. Honor your daughters, they are honorable. And educate your daughters, they are amazing."
A year after being shot, Malala is clear about her goal. "I speak for education of every child, in every corner of the world," Malala says. "There has been a discrimination in our society," which she believes must be defeated. "We women are going to bring change. We are speaking up for girls' rights, but we must not behave like men, like they have done in the past."
Perhaps she has learned from her father's experience. When asked what gave him a passion for girls' education, Yousafzai points out that he was "born in a society where girls are ignored." Living with five sisters, he was sensitive to discrimination from an early age. "In the morning, I was used to milk and cream, and my sisters were given only tea," he remembers.
Yousafzai felt the injustice even more when Malala was born. He later opened a school that Malala attended in the Swat Valley. At the time, the Taliban's influence was gaining power and both Yousafzais were firmly on their radar. "But we thought that even terrorists might have some ethics," Yousafzai explains. "Because they destroyed some 1,500 schools but they never injured a child. And she was a child."
Malala says that the shooting has taken away her fear. "I have already seen death and I know that death is supporting me in my cause of education. Death does not want to kill me," she says. "Before this attack, I might have been a little bit afraid how death would be. Now I'm not, because I have experienced it."
When asked if she is having any fun now with all her campaigning, Malala laughs, "It's a very nice question. I miss those days." But she also says that there is another side to her than what is shown in the media. "Outside of my home, I look like a very obedient, very serious, very good kind of girl, but nobody knows what happens inside the house." There, she says she's not naughty, but she has to stand up to her brothers. "It's good to fight with your brothers and it's good to tease them to give them advice." She says her little brother doesn't really understand why his sister has so much attention. "He said, 'Malala...I can't understand why people are giving you prizes, and everywhere you go people say, 'This is Malala' and they give you awards, what have you done?'" she jokes.
Malala knows the Taliban would still like to kill her, but says she hopes to return to Pakistan one day. "First, I need to empower myself with knowledge, with education. I need to work hard," she explains. "And when I [am] powerful, then I will go back to Pakistan, Inshallah [God willing]."
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Why Harry Reid Won’t Take Yes for an Answer
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Majority Leader Harry Reid moved the goal posts. On Saturday, when Republican Senate negotiators came to work, they thought they were close to a deal with Democrats based on the proposal offered by Republican Sen. Susan Collins. The government would be reopened for six months in exchange for a delay of the medical device tax that helps fund Obamacare, flexibility in managing sequestration cuts, and new requirements to verify income for those entering the federal exchanges as a part of the Affordable Care Act. But the Senate Democratic leader didn't like the six-month date, so he called it off.
Why did Reid back out? The agreement would have made it harder for Democrats to negotiate changes to the next round of sequestration cuts, something they have sought as part of a larger budget deal. If Reid was moving the goal posts, it's because he—or some of the Democrats negotiating with Collins—temporarily forgot where he'd put them.
It has always been a Democratic goal to wipe out the new round of sequestration cuts that kick in next January. It was something they were hoping to negotiate once the government shutdown ended and all the lights were turned back on. It was on the Democratic wish-list, just as entitlement and tax reform are on the GOP list. What elevated the issue into the center of the debate this weekend was the six-month timeline in Collins’ proposal. Under that agreement, which Collins worked on with Democratic senators, the government would be kept open until March. That seems reasonable, given how long it will take negotiators to wrangle with each other in the post-shutdown negotiations. But that also means that new sequestration cuts scheduled to start in January would kick in while the negotiations were ongoing. Democrats worry that if they allow them to take effect they won't be able to negotiate for their removal.
Democrats say they aren't dictating how the future sequestration cuts will be replaced, just that they want to have a chance to negotiate how to replace them. "Republicans want to do it with entitlement cuts," said Sen. Chuck Schumer on Face the Nation. "Democrats want to do it with a mix of mandatory cuts, some entitlements and revenues. And so how do you overcome that dilemma? We're not going to overcome it in the next day or two. But if we were to open up the government for a period of time that concluded before the sequester took place, which is Jan. 15, we could have a whole bunch of discussions."
Reid would like the government to stay open for a shorter period of time and the debt ceiling lifted for a longer period. McConnell would like something closer to the opposite.
This disagreement about dates is what caused the six Democrats working with Collins to say that they did not support her final offer. Some Republicans have claimed that the Democrats are trying to change the Budget Control Act, which is the law of the land. They are, but not as a condition of ending the partial shutdown or lifting the debt ceiling. That's an important distinction because actually asking to change the budget law now would be identical to the GOP requesting to lock in specific entitlement changes as a condition of lifting the debt ceiling or funding the government. The administration and Democrats have said that linking those issues to the current crisis is out of bounds.
As a negotiating posture however, Democrats have no problem letting Republicans charge that Reid spent the weekend attempting to undue the Budget Control Act. When the final agreement includes no such thing, Republicans will be able to claim that they thwarted Reid’s plan.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Reid should just take yes for an answer, but Reid thinks he has enough leverage to hold steady and not deal away future discussions on the sequestration cuts. Democrats say, “Why should we diminish our right to negotiate in the future over something they don't like, just because Ted Cruz and some House Republicans created a crisis?” This is the White House’s position, too. When asked if they were overplaying their hand, an administration official pointed to this weekend’s rallies with Cruz and Sarah Palin. The demonstrations on the mall were keeping the Tea Party brand in the news, which Democrats believe hamper those lawmakers who are trying to ameliorate the Tea Party inspired budget detour over Obamacare.
So now Reid and McConnell will have a debate about dates. It's not an impossible divide. Reid would like the government to stay open for a shorter period of time and the debt ceiling lifted for a longer period. McConnell would like something closer to the opposite. Those are not differences big enough to cause a breach of the debt limit and suggest that, despite the weekend hiccup, the Senate will get its act together. After this brief Senate interlude, we'll be focused on the House again. House Speaker John Boehner will have to decide what bill he brings to the floor and how many Democrats he'll need to pass it. Will he be able to get a majority of Republicans, as he did during the debt limit votes of 2011 and early 2013? The clock is ticking.
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/harry_reid_and_government_shutdown_negotiations_democrats_want_a_deal_that.html
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Justices consider decades-old Michigan affirmative action ban
WASHINGTON (AP) — Affirmative action opponents persuaded Michigan voters to outlaw any consideration of race after the Supreme Court ruled a decade ago that race could be a factor in college admissions.
That state's constitutional amendment is now being examined by the high court to determine whether the change the voters sought is in fact discriminatory.
It is a proposition that even the lawyer for civil rights groups in favor of affirmative action acknowledges is a tough sell, at first glance.
"How can a provision that is designed to end discrimination in fact discriminate?" said Mark Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union. Yet that is the difficult argument Rosenbaum will make on Tuesday to a court that has grown more skeptical about taking race into account in education since its Michigan decision in 2003.
A victory for Rosenbaum's side would imperil similar voter-approved initiatives that banned affirmative action in education in California and Washington state. A few other states have adopted laws or issued executive orders to bar race-conscious admissions policies.
Black and Latino enrollment at the University of Michigan has dropped since the ban took effect. At California's top public universities, African-Americans are a smaller share of incoming freshmen, while Latino enrollment is up slightly, but far below the state's growth in the percentage of Latino high school graduates.
The case is the court's second involving affirmative action in as many years. In June, the justices ordered lower courts to take another look at the University of Texas admissions plan in a ruling that could make it harder for public colleges to justify any use of race in admissions.
For Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, whose office is defending the measure known as Proposal 2, the case is simple.
"We are saying no preferences. We're not discriminating. We're saying equal treatment," Schuette said.
But the federal appeals court in Cincinnati that ruled on the dispute concluded that the matter was not that straightforward.
The issue, according to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was not affirmative action, but the way in which its opponents went about trying to bar it.
That is why the ACLU's Rosenbaum said, "This is a case about means, not about ends. It is not about whether a state can choose not to have" affirmative action.
In its 8-7 decision, the appeals court said the provision runs afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment because it presents an extraordinary burden to affirmative action supporters who would have to mount their own long, expensive campaign to repeal the constitutional provision.
That burden "undermines the Equal Protection Clause's guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change," Judge R. Guy Cole Jr. wrote for the majority on the appeals court.
The governing boards at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and other public colleges set admissions policies at the schools, which included the use of affirmative action before the amendment passed.
Other groups seeking changes in admissions still could lobby the policymakers at the schools. Only proponents of affirmative action would have to change the constitution, the appeals court said.
The appeals court vote broke along party lines, and there were other oddities. Two Republican-appointed judges sat out the case because of their ties to Michigan schools. One judge in the majority, Martha Craig Daughtrey, is a senior judge and typically would not be allowed to take part in the full appeals court hearing. But she sat on the original three-judge panel that heard the case.
Civil rights and education experts who are not involved in the case at the high court said they expect the justices to overturn the 6th Circuit ruling.
Harvard University Law School professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin said five of the Supreme Court justices "are skeptical of race-conscious affirmative action" and could be expected to side with Michigan. Those justices are Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
But Brown-Nagin said impact of such a ruling would be muted because "affirmative action already is on life support."
Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and an opponent of racial preferences, was more blunt. "I would eat a copy of the 14th Amendment if in fact the court upholds the 6th Circuit's decision," Kirsanow said.
Justice Elena Kagan will not take part in the Michigan case, just as she excused herself from last term's case about the University of Texas admissions program. Kagan worked on the cases while serving in the Justice Department before she joined the court.
The case is Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 12-682.
___
Follow Mark Sherman on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/shermancourt
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/justices-consider-michigan-affirmative-action-ban-194901174.html
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Monday, October 14, 2013
4 of 7 kidnapped aid workers freed in Syria
Geneva (AFP) - Efforts continued Monday to free three aid workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross who were kidnapped in Syria, after four fellow abductees were released.
"We are still doing our utmost to have our 3 other colleagues back safe & sound," the ICRC's director general Yves Daccord said on his Twitter feed.
No comment was available from the agency on a statement by the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights that the workers were kidnapped by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an Al-Qaeda-linked rebel group.
Rebels control large swathes of Idlib province, where six ICRC staff and a volunteer from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent were abducted by gunmen Sunday.
Kidnappings have become increasingly common in rebel-held parts of Syria, targeting both journalists and aid workers.
"Three ICRC colleagues and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteer have been released and are safe and sound. We are waiting for further information about the other three colleagues," ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told AFP.
No group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, which took place as the aid workers' convoy was driving back to Damascus after a four-day medical aid mission in Idlib.
The ICRC has not revealed details on their nationalities, although it earlier said that most of the group were Syrian.
Despite the kidnapping, which underlined the risks facing aid workers in Syria, the ICRC has vowed to continue its work in the war-torn country.
"We are completely committed to supporting the Syrian population in this difficult moment," Watson told Swiss public radio.
But the aid organisation said it was reviewing its security.
"We don't have any intention of stopping our activities in Syria, but of course this situation makes us reflect and take a close look at our operations because in the end, we will not be able to work and help the Syrian population without having security for our personnel," Watson said.
"We are worried that these types of incidents will prevent us from having as large of an access in the future and from carrying out our humanitarian work," he added.
Last year, the ICRC halted operations in parts of Pakistan following the kidnapping and murder of a British employee there.
The ICRC has some 30 expatriate staff in Syria, along with 120 local employees.
They work hand in hand with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, one of the few organisations able to deliver aid nationwide.
Security is a constant concern as aid workers go back and forth across the often fluid front lines in the war between a range of rebel groups and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
Twenty-two Red Crescent volunteers have been killed since the conflict erupted in March 2011, the ICRC's Damascus spokesman Simon Schorno told AFP, adding that he did not immediately have a figure for the number active in the field.
The United Nations has 4,800 people working in Syria, said Jens Laerke, spokesman for its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the vast majority of them Syrians.
According to the specialist website aidworkersecurity.org, whose data runs to September 4, a total of 39 Syrian aid workers have been killed or wounded since the war began.
Two foreign staff have also died, while three German aid workers this year escaped several months after being kidnapped in Idlib.
Syria's war has claimed more than 115,000 lives, driven over two million people out of the country and left millions more within its borders reliant on aid to survive.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/three-icrc-staff-red-crescent-volunteer-freed-syria-005109811.html
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Saturday, October 12, 2013
A Political Bloodbath for Republicans
Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration — and the martyrdom — they sought. Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP. At least so far, the standoff has been a political bloodbath for Republicans. And maybe that’s exactly what was needed to right the political system: The effort to gut Obamacare had to crash like this so that Republican leaders and lawmakers would find the courage to stand up to tea party toughs, and so that business leaders would decide to stop funding a small band of right-wing activists whose interests are antithetical to their own.
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Thursday, October 10, 2013
PC shipments fall for sixth straight quarter
intel
Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663301/s/3242da5e/sc/21/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Ctechnology0Cpcs0Eshipments0Efall0Esixth0Estraight0Equarter0E8C11363480A/story01.htm
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20 hours ago
Dell
Dell's recently announced XPS 15, which starts at $1,500, has a 15.6-inch display with 3200x1800 pixels, record resolution, for a PC laptop. It also uses the latest "Haswell" series of Intel processors. Both factors may be a plus in the PC market, which has suffered because of tablets and smartphones.
Worldwide shipments of personal computers fell in the third quarter of the year, the sixth straight quarter of decline as cheaper tablet computers and smartphones cut into demand, according to market research firms IDC and Gartner.
IDC said the market fell nearly 8 percent, to 81.6 million units, while Gartner put the decline at almost 9 percent, to 80.3 million. The two firms define PCs slightly differently.
IDC expects that the PC market will hit bottom sometime next year, with a recovery starting in 2015 as companies and consumers finally replace aging PCs. Gartner says this year will be the worst, with flat shipments next year and single-digit percentage growth in 2015.
"There's sort of a rubber band effect where PCs that need to be replaced will be," said IDC senior analyst Jay Chou.
Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa said that in developed countries, consumers won't abandon PCs, though they are holding onto them longer and spending money on other gadgets before replacing them. "The overall market size will shrink, but at some point those old PCs will be replaced by new ones," she said.
The U.S. market emerged as a bright spot in both reports. IDC said the U.S. market was almost unchanged, while Gartner said it rose 3.5 percent. Gartner credited low supplies and Intel's new low-power Haswell line of chips with helping boost demand. IDC said falling prices of touch-enabled laptops also helped.
The outlook for a stabilizing PC market was mirrored by Hewlett-Packard, the world's No. 2 PC maker behind Lenovo. In a presentation before analysts Wednesday, the company predicted "stabilizing revenue declines" for its upcoming fiscal year, which starts in November.
The top 3 PC sellers — Lenovo, HP and Dell — all grew shipments between zero and 3 percent during the quarter, thanks in part to a healthy U.S. market, both research firms said. Acer and Asus suffered steep declines.
IDC said Acer and Asus suffered declines of about 34 percent, while Gartner pegged the drop at nearly 23 percent.
IDC said Acer suffered from weak consumer spending while Asus was hurt by a lack of corporate customers.
© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663301/s/3242da5e/sc/21/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Ctechnology0Cpcs0Eshipments0Efall0Esixth0Estraight0Equarter0E8C11363480A/story01.htm
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