My \'Small Video Star\' Fights for Her Life

By ADAM B. ELLICK

I had the privilege of following Malala Yousafzai, on and off, for six months in 2009, documenting some of the most critical days of her life for two films, “Class Dismissed in Swat Valley,” and “A Schoolgirl's Odyssey.” I was there for the final school day before the Taliban closed down her school in Pakistan's Swat Valley; through the summer when war displaced and separated her family; then the day she pleaded with President Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to intervene; and the uncertain afternoon she returned to discover the fate of her home, school, and her two pet chickens.

A year after my two-part documentary on her family was finished, Malala and father, Ziauddin, had become my friends. They stayed with me in Islamabad. Malala inherited my old Apple laptop. Once, we went shopping together for English-language books and DVDs. When Malala opted for some trashy Amer ican sitcoms, I was forced to remind myself that this girl â€" who had never shuddered at beheaded corpses, public floggings, and death threats directed at her father - was still just a kid.

Today, she is a teenager, fighting for life after being gunned down by the Taliban for doing what girls do all over the world: going to school.

The Malala I know transformed with age, from an obedient, rather shy girl 11-year-old into a publicly fearless teenager consumed with taking her activism to new heights. Her father's personal crusade to restore female education seemed contagious. He is a poet, a school owner and an unflinching educational activist. Ziauddin truly adores his two other sons, but he often referred to Malala as something entirely special. When he sent the boys to bed, Malala was permitted to sit with us as we talked about life and politics deep into the night.

After the film was seen, Malala became even more emboldened . She hosted foreign diplomats in Swat, held press conferences on peace and education, and as a result, she won a host of peace awards. Her best work, however, was that she kept going to school.

In the documentary, and on the surface, Malala comes across as a steady and calming force, undeterred by anxiety or risk. She is mature beyond her years. She never displayed a mood swing, and never complained about my laborious and redundant interviews.

But don't be fooled by her gentle demeanor and soft voice. Malala is also fantastically stubborn and feisty- traits that I hope will enable her recovery. When we struggled to secure a dial-up connection for her laptop, her luddite father scurried over to offer his advice. She didn't roll an eye, or bark back. Instead, she diplomatically told her father that she, not he, is the person to solve the problem - an uncommon act that defies Pakistani familial tradition. As he walked away, she offered me a smirk of confidence.

Another day, Ziauddin forgot Malala's birthday, and the non-confrontational daughter couldn't hold it in. She ridiculed her father in a text message, forced him to apologize, and to buy everyone a round of ice cream - which always made her really happy.

Her father was a bit traditional, and as a result, I was unable to interact with her mother. I used to chide Ziaduan about these restrictions, especially in front of Malala. Her father would laugh dismissively, and joke that Malala should not be listening. Malala beamed as I pressed her father to treat his wife as an equal. Sometimes I felt like her de-facto uncle. I could tell her father the things she couldn't.

I first met Malala in January 2009, just 10 days before the Taliban planned to close down her girls' school, and hundreds of others in the Swat Valley. It was too dangerous to travel to Swat, so we met in a dingy guesthouse on the outskirts of Peshawar, the same city where she is today fighting for her life in a military hospital.

In 10 days, her father would lose the family business, and Malala would lose her 5th grade education. I was there to assess the risks of reporting on this issue. With the help of a Pakistani journalist, I started interviewing Ziauddin. My anxiety rose with each of his answers. Militants controlled the checkpoints. They murdered anyone who dissented, often leaving beheaded corpses on the main square. Swat was too dangerous for a documentary.

I then solicited Malala's opinion. Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani journalist who was assisting my reporting and who knew the family, translated the conversation. This went on for about 10 minutes until I noticed, from her body language, that Malala understood my questions in English.

“Do you speak English?” I asked her.

“Yes, of course,” she said in perfect English. “I was just saying there is a fear in my heart that the Taliban are going to close my school.”

I was enamore d by Malala's presence ever since that sentence. But Swat was still too risky. For the first time in my career, I was in the awkward position of trying to convince a source, Ziauddin, that the story was not worth the risk. But Ziauddin fairly argued that he is already a public activist in Swat, prominent in the local press, and that if the Taliban want to kill him or his family, then they would do so anyway. He said he was willing to die for the cause. But I never asked Malala if she was willing to die as well.

Finally, my favorite memory of Malala is the only time I was with her without her father. It's the scene at the end of the second film, when she is exploring her decrepit classroom, which the military had turned into a bunker after they had pushed the Taliban out of the valley. I asked her to give me a tour of the ruins of the school. The scene seems written or staged. But all I did was press record and this 11-year-old girl spoke eloquently from the heart.

< p>She noticed how the soldiers drilled a lookout hole into the wall of her classroom, scribbling on the wall with a yellow highlighter “This is Pakistan.”

Malala looked at the marking, and said, “Look! This is Pakistan. Taliban destroyed us.”

In her latest email to me, in all caps, she wrote “I WANT AN ACCESS TO THE WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE.” And she signed it, “YOUR SMALL VIDEO STAR.”

I too wanted her to access the broader world, so during one of my final nights in Pakistan, I took a long midnight walk with her father, and spoke to him frankly about options for Malala's education. I was less concerned with her safety as the Pakistani military had, in large part, won the war against the Taliban. We talked about her potential to thrive on a global level, and I suggested a few actions steps towards securing scholarships for elite boarding schools in Pakistan, or even in the United States. Her father beamed with pride, but added, “In a few years. S he isn't ready yet.”

I don't think he was ready, to let her go. And who can blame him for that?

Pakistani Activist, 14, Shot by Taliban

October 9, 2012, 10:57 am

By ROBERT MACKEY

A spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan's Swat Valley claimed responsibility for the shooting on Tuesday of a 14-year-old activist who is an outspoken advocate of education for girls. The attack on Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head on her way home from school in Mingora, the region's main city, outraged many Pakistanis, but a militant spokesman told a newspaper the group would target the girl again if she survived.

Come on , brothers, be REAL MEN. Kill a school girl.

- Nadeem F. Paracha (@NadeemfParacha) 9 Oct 12

Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, told Reuters in a telepho ne interview Malala “was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her idol.” He admitted that she was young, but said that “she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas,” referring to the ethnic group in northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan whose conservative values the Taliban claims to defend.

Another girl, who was wounded in the attack, said in a television interview with Pakistan's Express News that a man had stopped the school bus and asked which girl was Malala before opening fire.

A video report from Pakistan's Express News on the shooting of a 14-year-old activist in Pakistan's Swat Valley on Tuesday features an interview with a wounded witness.

Pakistan's Express Tribune reported that doctors at a hospital in Mingora, the region's main city, said that Malala was “out of danger” because the bullet that “struck her skull and came out on the o ther side and hit her shoulder” had not damaged her brain. The newspaper added that the girl was later moved to Peshawar in a Pakistani Army helicopter.

Malala became well-known in Pakistan as the author of a blog for the BBC's Urdu-language Web site, “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl,” in which she chronicled life under Taliban rule, after the Swat Valley was overrun by the Islamist militants in 2009. “At that time,” she wrote later, “some of us would go to school in plain clothes, not in school uniform, just to pretend we are not students, and we hid our books under our shawls.”

My colleague Adam Ellick interviewed Malala extensively in 2009, for a two-part documentary about her father's struggle to reopen a school for girls in Swat after the Pakistani military regained control of the valley from the Taliban.

A BBC News video report on Malala broadcast last year included footage of her reading from the diary she kept under the pen name Gul Ma kai when she was 11.

Online, a Genome Project for the World of Art

Any music fan knows that there are myriad ways to find new songs online: a scroll through digital playlists and streaming radio services like Pandora, which serve as musical recommendation engines. Likewise, Netflix subscribers are regularly showered with suggestions for, say, romantic comedies and horror films, based on previously viewed movies.

But until now, there was no automated guidance for art lovers seeking discoveries online - no “If you like Jackson Pollock's ‘No. 1,' you may also enjoy Mark Rothko's ‘No. 18.' ”

Enter Art.sy, a start-up whose public version went live on Monday. An extensive free repository of fine-art images and an online art appreciation guide, it is predicated on the idea that audiences comfortable with image-driven Web sites like Tumblr and Pinterest are now primed to spend hours browsing through canvases and sculpture on their monitors and tablets, especially with one-click help.

After two years of private testing and with millions of dollars from investors, including some celebrities in the art and technology worlds, the site aims to do for visual art what Pandora did for music and Netflix for film: become a source of discovery, pleasure and education.

With 275 galleries and 50 museums and institutions as partners, Art.sy has already digitized 20,000 images into its reference system, which it calls the Art Genome Project. But as it extends the platform's reach, Art.sy also raises questions about how (or if) digital analytics should be applied to visual art. Can algorithms help explain art?

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, has his doubts. “It depends so much on the information, who's doing the selection, what the criteria are, and what the cultural assumptions behind those criteria are,” Mr. Storr, a former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, said. In terms of art comprehension, he added, “I'm sure it will be reductive.”

The technology, at least, is expansive. To make suggestions successfully, computers must be taught expert human judgment, a process that starts with labeling: give a machine codes to tell the difference between a Renaissance portrait and a Modernist drip painting, say, and then it can sort through endless works, making comparisons and drawing connections.

For the Art Genome Project, Matthew Israel, 34, who holds a Ph.D. in art and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, leads a team of a dozen art historians who decide what those codes are and how they should be applied. Some labels (Art.sy calls them “genes” and recognizes about 800 of them, with more added daily) denote fairly objective qualities, like the historical period and region the work comes from and whether it is figurative or abstract, or belongs in an established category like Cubism, Flemish portraiture or photography.

Other labels are highly subjective, even quirky; for contemporary art, for example, Art.sy's curators might attach terms like “globalization” and “culture critique” to give ideological context. “Contemporary traces of memory” is an elastic theme assigned to pieces by the Chinese Conceptual artist Cai Guo-Qiang and the photographer and filmmaker Matt Saunders.

A Picasso might be tagged with “Cubism,” “abstract painting,” “Spain,” “France” and “love,” all terms that are visible and searchable on the site. Jackson Pollock's works typically get “abstract art,” “New York School,” “splattered/dripped,” “repetition” and “process-oriented.” Predictably, some of those criteria show up on paintings by Pollock's contemporaries Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning, but also on artists from different eras and styles, like Tara Donovan, whose contemporary abstract sculptures using stacked and layered plastic foam and paper plates have also been marked with “repetition.”

As the categories are applied, each is assigned a value between 1 and 100: an Andy Warhol might rate high on the Pop Art scale, while a post-Warholian could rank differently, depending on influences. Software can help filter images for basic visual qualities like color, but the soul of the judgment is human.

“Literally, a person goes in by hand, and they enter a number for all the relevant fields,” Mr. Israel said.

The technical complexity is outweighed by the curatorial challenges. “We learned that the data matters much more than the math,” said Daniel Doubrovkine, 35, who is in charge of engineering at Art.sy. “How are you going to pick something that shows ‘warmth' with a machine? We're not.”

Similarly, Pandora has a roomful of musicologists deconstructing each tune; their analysis is then fed into an algorithm, called the Music Genome Project, that recommends songs in its player based on users' taste and the ratings they give each track. (Joe Kennedy, the chief executive of Pandora, served as a consultant to Art.sy.)

But Art.sy aims to make connections among artworks that are seemingly from different worlds, with a catalog that encompasses pieces from the British Museum, the National Gallery in Washington, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and others. A recent partner, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in Manhattan, a branch of the Smithsonian, has added objects to the mix, which will be a test of the site's technology and the parallels it draws, said Seb Chan, the Cooper-Hewitt's director of digital and emerging media.

Culturally, “what does it mean to recommend a painting from seeing a seventh-century spoon, for example?” he said. Anticipating such questions, the Art.sy staff has a blog explaining how its process works.

U.S. Panel Cites Risks in Chinese Equipment

WASHINGTON - In the latest development to highlight the sensitive terrain that the United States and China are navigating on economic issues, a House committee issued a blistering bipartisan report on Monday that accused two of China's largest telecommunications companies of being arms of the government that had stolen intellectual property from American companies and could potentially spy on Americans.

The House Intelligence Committee said that after a yearlong investigation it had come to the conclusion that the Chinese businesses, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Inc., were a national security threat because of their attempts to extract sensitive information from American companies and their loyalties to the Chinese government.

The companies sell telecommunications equipment needed to create and operate wireless networks, like the ones used by Verizon Wireless and AT&T. Many of the major suppliers of the equipment are based outside the United States, creating concerns here about the security of communications.

Those concerns are most acute about Huawei and ZTE because of their close ties to the Chinese government, which the committee said has heavily subsidized the companies. Allowing the Chinese companies to do business in the United States, the report said, would give the Chinese government the ability to easily intercept communications and could allow it to start online attacks on critical infrastructure, like dams and power grids.

The release of the report comes as both presidential candidates have spoken of the importance of United States ties with China and have promised to act strongly on Chinese currency and trade practices that are damaging to American business interests.

, the Republican presidential candidate, has called repeatedly during his campaign for a more confrontational approach to China on business issues, although he has focused his warnings more on Chinese currency market interventions than on the activities of the nation's telecommunications companies.

has also taken a tougher stance on China recently. Late last month, Mr. Obama, through the Committee on Foreign Investment, ordered a Chinese company to divest itself of interests in four wind farm projects near a Navy base in Oregon where training takes place. It was the first time a president had blocked such a deal in 22 years.

The Obama administration has also filed a case at the World Trade Organization in Geneva accusing China of unfairly subsidizing its exports of autos and auto parts, the ninth trade action the administration has brought against China.

“We have a process that is not aimed at one specific company but using all the assets and parts of U.S. government aimed at protecting our telecommunications and critical infrastructure,” a senior White House official said.

The report was released on Monday morning at a news conference held by

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative C. A. Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee.

They said that the United States government should be barred from doing business with Huawei and ZTE and that American companies should avoid buying their equipment.

The report said the committee had obtained internal documents from former employees of Huawei that showed it supplied services to a “” unit in the People's Liberation Army.

The United States government, the report said, should go through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel that reviews the national security implications of foreign investments, to carry out its recommendations. It also said that committee should block any mergers and acquisitions involving the Chinese companies and American businesses.

In the course of the investigation, the House committee said it had uncovered evidence of economic espionage - and officials said on Monday that they planned to hand over the evidence to the F.B.I.

Former and current employees for Huawei, the report said, told investigators for the committee that the company had committed “potential violations” in the United States related to , bribery, corruption and copyright infringement.

Huawei has been the focus of criticism and security warnings for years, including by the Defense Department. Its expansion plans in the United States have faced resistance from Congress over questions about its ties to the military in China.

Huawei denies being financed to undertake research and development for the Chinese military, and its executives have repeatedly insisted that they have nothing to hide. The company issued an open letter to the United States government in February 2011, asking for an inquiry to clear up what it characterized as misperceptions about its history and business operations.