Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl brought to England after being shot in the head by the Taliban, has announced the first donation from her new education charity with the support of Hollywood superstar Angelina Jolie.

Malala, who now attends Edgbaston High School for girls in Birmingham, said it was the happiest moment of her life, in a video played at the Women in the World summit in New York City.

The 15-year-old set up the Malala Fund after surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban in October, after standing up for her right to go to school in her home country.

She spent hours undergoing major surgery at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham wherea surgeons tried to repair the damage caused by a bullet which grazed her brain.

The grant of 45,000 US dollars will be given to an unnamed organisation in the Swat Valley in Pakistan to support the education of 40 girls aged five to 12 who would otherwise be forced into domestic labour.

The organisation, which was not named for security reasons, will offer a safe place for the girls to study as well as financial support for their families.

In a video played to an audience of thousands she said: “Announcing the first grant of the Malala Fund is the happiest moment in my life.

“I invite all of you to support the Malala Fund and let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls.”
Hollywood actress and UN special envoy Jolie introduced the video and pledged to give 200,000 US dollars to the fund.

She praised the young girl’s courage.

“Here’s what they accomplished,” Jolie said of Malala’s attackers. “They shot her point-blank range in the head – and made her stronger. The brutal attempt to silence her voice made it stronger.”

The Malala Fund supports the education and empowerment of girls in Pakistan and around the world and provides grants to civil society organizations and individuals focused on education.

The fund is run by a board of trustees, including Malala and her family, with the support of the Vital Voices Global Partnership, founded by Hilary Clinton.

(Reuters) - Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in some of the worst sectarian violence in Egypt for months.Christian-Muslim confrontations have increased in Muslim-majority Egypt since the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak in 2011 gave freer rein to hardline Islamists repressed under his rule.
Four Christian Copts and one Muslim were killed when members of both communities started fighting and shooting at each other in El Khusus north of the Egyptian capital, the sources said. State news agency MENA put the death toll at four.
An angry crowd smashed shops belonging to Christians, residents said. A Reuters reporter saw a burned-out Coptic day care centre and several damaged shops belonging to Christian traders. An apartment inhabited by Muslims was also burned.
Residents said the violence broke out on Friday when a group of Christian children were drawing on a wall of a Muslim religious institute.
A Reuters reporter saw what looked like a swastika drawn on the wall. Muslim residents said it had offended them because it looked like a cross.
"I saw the kids drawing on the wall after afternoon prayers so I grabbed them and told them to remove what they'd just written," said Mahmoud Mahmoud al-Alfi, a Muslim resident.
Then another man arrived and started beating the children, drawing a large crowd, he said. The situation escalated when someone drew a gun and fired into the air, killing one boy with a stray bullet.
"Suddenly the area was full of weapons," Alfi said, while weeping Muslim women sat nearby in front of a house, showing pictures of a man they said had been killed during the clashes.
The president's office expressed condolences to the victims and vowed to fight any sectarian violence.
"The presidency ... totally rejects any attempt against the unity and cohesiveness of Egyptian society and will decisively confront any attempt to spark sectarian strife among Egyptian people, Muslim and Christian," according to a statement.
Muslim leaders were also quick to condemn the sectarian violence which comes as Egypt struggles with a severe economic crisis and high inflation after two years of political upheaval.
Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, of Egypt's leading Islamic authority Al-Azhar, urged measures to prevent the situation from escalating and to "preserve the national character which characterises the Egyptian people, Muslims and Christians," MENA said.
"The sectarian riots which happened in El Khusus are unacceptable and grave," Saad al-Katatni, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood political party, said on his Facebook website. "There are some who want to set Egypt ablaze and create crises."
President Mohamed Mursi, a Brotherhood leader elected in June, has promised to protect the rights of Copts, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 84 million people.
TIGHT SECURITY
On Saturday the situation was calm but tense in the small town where Muslims and Christians live close to each other but in separate streets. Security was tight with police vehicles parked in the main streets.
Police detained 15 people, a security source said.
In a Christian neighbourhood dozens of angry young men gathered at noon on Saturday, chanting "with our blood and soul we sacrifice ourselves for the cross". The crowds left after a priest came and asked them to leave to calm tensions.
"There are people who want to cause sectarian strife between Muslims and Christians," said a Christian man who gave his name as Kameel. "I've been here longer than 30 years and I have never seen any violence or extremism in our area."
Sectarian tensions have often flared into violence, particularly in rural areas where rivalries between clans or families sometimes add to friction. Love affairs between Muslims and Christians have also sparked clashed in the past.
Since Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising, Christians have complained of several attacks on churches by radical Islamists, incidents that have sharpened longstanding Christian complaints about being sidelined in the workplace and in law.
As an example, they point to rules that make it harder to obtain official permission to build a church than a mosque.
Last month, a court sentenced a Muslim to death for killing two people in a dispute with Christians in a southern town.
In October 2011, 25 people, most of them Coptic demonstrators, were killed in clashes with troops in Cairo.
Sorce:

The second day of the Lux Cozi TOIFA celebrations, leading up to the grand finale in Vancouver, saw notable names from Bollywood and quotable quotes by them becoming the highlight of the evening.

A vibrant extravaganza by designer Manish Malhotra celebrated 100 years of Indian cinema and the trendsetting fashion in Hindi films over the decades, with Urmila Matondkar, Raveena Tandon, Neha Dhupia, Nargis Fakhri and Sonal Chauhan turning showstoppers. The evening saw technical awards being given across 12 categories. 

Award                                             Winner                                         Film
Best Editing                                  Namrata Rao                                   Kahaani
Best Cinematography                   S Ravi Varman                                 Barfi
Best Choreography                    Ganesh Acharya -                             Chikni Chameli     Agneepath
Best Special Effects                   Kvsanjit, Rajiv Ghosh                         Raaz 3
Best Costume Design               Aki Narula, Shafalina                           Barfi
Best Art Direction                        Rajat Podar                                     Barfi
Best Action                               Conrad Palmisano, Markos               Ek Tha Tiger
Best Background Score                   Pritam                                          Barfi
Best Sound Recording             Anita Khushwaha                                  Talaash
Best Story                             Advaita Kala, Sujoy Ghosh                    Kahaani
Best Screenplay                         Sujoy Ghosh                                     Kahaani
Best Dialogue                     Anurag Kashyap, Akhilesh Jaiswal,         Gangs of Wasseypur I
                                              Zeishan Quadri, Sachin Ladia    

Google has released its Maps app for the iPhone, in the wake of complaints about Apple's software.

Apple controversially replaced the search giant's mapping service with its own when it released its latest handset, the iPhone 5.

The move was widely criticised after numerous mistakes were found in Apple Maps's search results.

Google's app introduces functions previously restricted to Android devices.

One analyst said it would prove popular, but added that Nokia still posed a challenge.

The Finnish company recently launched its own free maps app for the iPhone.

The firms are motivated in part by a desire to gather data automatically generated by handsets using their respective software, as well as users' own feedback.

This allows them to fine-tune their services and improve the accuracy of features such as traffic status updates.
Android's advantage

Features Google has introduced that were not available in its earlier iPhone app include:

    Voice guided turn-by-turn directions, with estimated travel times.
    Indoor panoramic images of buildings that have signed up to its Street View Business Photos service
    3D representations of the outlines of buildings that can be viewed from different angles
    Vector-based graphics based on mathematical lines and points rather than pre-created bitmap graphics, making it quicker to zoom in and out of an area.

Among the facilities Google's iPhone app lacks that are present in its Android equivalent are indoor maps, the ability to download maps for offline viewing, and voice search.

However, over time, project manager Kai Hansen told the BBC that what was on one platform should be on the other.

"The goal is clearly to make it as unified and consistent an experience as possible," he said.
Ground Truth

One area Apple's own software still has an edge is its integration of Flyover which offers interactive photo-realistic views of selected cities using 3D-rendered graphics within its maps app.

Google offers a similar facility via Google Earth which is promoted in its main maps app, but involves switching into a separate program.

However, for many users the key feature will be the level of accuracy that Google offers.

Since 2008, the firm's Ground Truth project has mashed together licensed data with information gathered by its own fleet of Street View cars and bicycles.

The images and sensor data they collect are analysed by computers and humans to identify street signs, business names, road junctions and other key features. To date, more than five million miles (eight million km) of roads across 45 countries have been covered.

This information is supplemented by the public filing their own reports. iPhone users are encouraged to do likewise by shaking their handsets to activate a feedback function.

"Google Maps, as much as any other map application, lives from the data that we receive," Mr Hansen explained.

"If a road is closed for the next six months, or a road was opened two days ago - these are things that somebody who lives next to the road immediately notices, but if you're not in the area it becomes hard to know.

"The more we can give you the ability to let us know about things that are changing on the map, the more other users will benefit from that corrected information."

He added that once operators verify these reports, changes can be made "within minutes, rather than hours".

Apple is also seeking to improve its own data through user feedback, but risks having less to work with if iPhone users switch to another product.

There had been speculation Apple would reject Google's app from its store for this reason.

But since iPhone sales are at the heart of Apple's fortunes, it may have felt it had more to lose than gain by allowing rival Android handsets to offer a popular app it lacked.
'Neutral' Nokia

Google's launch will also have consequences for Nokia, which recently launched its own Here Maps app on iOS.

The European firm's location division is decades older than Google's, and also has a strong reputation for accuracy.

However, the Here app has had a shaky start with many users complaining about problems with its interface - a consequence of it being written in the HTML5 web language rather than as a native app, specifically for the iOS system.

Even so, one telecoms analyst said it would be premature to write the company out of the game.

"I'm not convinced Nokia as a brand for maps will become a big thing in the consumer consciousness, but what I think is going to happen is that more businesses are going to quietly do deals with it for maps," said Ben Wood from CCS Insight.

"Because of the issues that Apple had, people have suddenly understood the importance of quality mapping and they may also say they don't want to go to Google as all of the data then runs through the search firm, strengthening it as a competitor. Nokia is more of a neutral partner.

"Amazon has already done a deal with Nokia on its Kindle tablets, and I wouldn't be surprised if RIM's new Blackberry devices and Facebook follow."

sorce: BBC

There is a reason why Yash Chopra and Shah Rukh Khan are called the Kings of Romance, they have managed to weave one unforgettable love story after the other that remains etched in our memories. 'Jab Tak Hai Jaan', Yash Chopra's last directorial venture had created ample pre-release buzz and the anticipation in the theatre was palpable. 'Jab Tak Hai Jaan' is yet another impossible love story made believable by the conviction of the makers.
Samar Anand (Shah Rukh) does odd jobs in London for sustenance, needless to say our quintessential Bollywood hero is multi-faceted; he croons, he grooves, he has a heart of gold and he is charmer all the way. On a cold London night, while cleaning snow from the sidewalks, Samar falls for the beautiful Meera (Katrina Kaif), Indian billionaire's daughter who is always negotiating with God and cutting deals to accomplish her unfulfilled wishes. Quite obviously their love for each other is mired by impossibilities.
Yash Chopra romances are historically high on sacrifices and the two besotted lovers are driven apart by circumstances. Our suave odd-job man is now Major Samar Anand, nicknamed 'The man who cannot die' because of his daredevil acts of courage. Rookie documentary filmmaker, Akira (Anushka Sharma) wants to film the fearless bomb squad head and needless to say, the feisty kudi soon finds herself falling hook, line and sinker for our intense army man.
Unrequited love and loyalty, pangs of separation and characters with a propensity for sacrifice; these are all familiar tropes in Bollywood but Yash Chopra has his way of creating the perfect mise-en-scène and converting you into a believer. For die hard romantics, philosophies like 'There is a time for every love story' is sure to become a mantra, much like, 'Someone somewhere is made for you'.
At 47, Shah Rukh, still strikes the right notes as the typical romantic hero. Anushka essays her part with ease but Katrina still needs to work on getting the emotional parts right. Rahman's music too doesn't really grow on you after you have watched the film.
JTHJ doesn't quite stand out like some of Yash Chopra's previous works and the pace of the second half seems to drag a bit. It's just that when you watch the film, the canvas is picturesque, the characters are gorgeous and the story restores your faith in good, in love and in impossible relationships.