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A teacher claims she was left 'humiliated' after being ordered to apologise to 11-year-olds at a private girls' school – for calling them girls. Bosses at the £20,000-a-year school told the woman to deliver the mea culpa after her class complained that she had said 'good afternoon, girls' at the start of a lesson, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. After being told by the pupils that 'not everyone here identifies as female', she arrived in class the following day to find they had pointedly written their names and pronouns on the board, including one who used they/them. They also...

MIRAN SHAH, Pakistan - Pro-Taliban militants seized control of a shrine in northwestern Pakistan and renamed it after Islamabad's Red Mosque, while 10 people died in the latest violence near the Afghan border, officials said Monday. About 70 pro-Taliban militants occupied the shrine of renowned Pashtun freedom fighter Sahib Turangzai and its accompanying mosque in the town of Lakarai in Mohmand tribal region on Sunday, a spokesman for the militants and a local government official said. The militants declared their support for the radical leaders of the Red Mosque that was stormed by Pakistan's army this month after its clerics...

SNIPPET: "Kabul, 21 April (AKI) - At least 12 female students were hospitalised in Afghanistan on Wednesday after inhaling a poisonous substance sprayed at a school in northern Afghanistan. The 12 students of the Fatima Zahra Girl School, and a teacher and an assistant were mysteriously poisoned, Hamayon Khamush, director of the hospital in Kunduz city, was quoted as saying by Xinhua." SNIPPET: "To defend their ideology, Taliban militants have attacked girl students with gas and acid." SNIPPET: "In May last year 90 girls were hospitalised in Kapisa province, north-east of the capital, after someone sprayed toxic chemicals in the...

SNIPPET: "PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Taliban militants blew up a girls' school in Pakistan's Khyber district Monday, officials said, as two soldiers and seven insurgents were killed in clashes in the northwest tribal belt. The pre-dawn school attack took place in Saddokhel town in northwest Khyber tribal district, where militants detonated explosives planted around the building, destroying all five school rooms but causing no injuries. "They are Taliban. They are the same people who do not want children to get an education," senior administration official Rahim Gul Khattak told AFP. Islamist militants opposed to co-education have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly...

SNIPPET: "PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Islamist militants blew up a girls school in Pakistan's lawless Khyber tribal district Sunday, destroying the building and wounding four people in neighbouring homes, officials said. Two explosions ripped through the 18-room government high school for girls at Kari Gar village and a boy who watched the premises is missing..." SNIPPET: "Islamist militants, who have carved out a strong presence in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border, have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the northwest of the country in recent years. Nearly 200 schools were destroyed in the Swat valley alone...

Suspected Islamist militants blew up a girls school close to the main city in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, police said. The school was empty at the time of the blast and no one was injured. A timed explosive device is believed to have caused the explosion that badly damaged the school on the outskirts of Peshawar, police officer Hamdullah Khan said. Al-Qaida and Taliban militants hold sway across much of northwest Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan and have often targeted girls' schools in both country's because they believe that women should not be educated. The military has launched large...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - After more than five years, the Pentagon revealed why it is holding a Saudi nicknamed "the Professor" at Guantanamo Bay, saying he once lived with a Sept. 11 conspirator and received a stipend from Osama bin Laden. Shaker Aamer's lawyer denies the allegations, made after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week requested the release of the Saudi, who has been an unofficial leader among the detainees, and four other former residents of Britain. The Bush administration, which has been urging other nations to accept Guantanamo prisoners amid international pressure to close the military jail,...

Responding to threats from the Taliban, at least 10 girls' schools have shut down near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Visiting the schools is a dangerous proposition -- a trip leading directly into the heart of Islamist territory. When the deputy director of Aqtash High School talks of the government, he isn't referring to Hamid Karzai's central government in Kabul. Nor does he refer to the provincial administration in Kunduz. "The Taliban are our government," Bashir says. "They have taken over our region, their commanders give the orders here." Bashir is standing in a dusty classroom on the ground floor of...

CHARIKAR, Afghanistan -- Nearly 50 teenagers were admitted to hospital after a suspected mass poisoning at an Afghan girls' school, a doctor said on Monday, in the second such incident in a month. The headmaster rushed his students out of their classrooms in the northern town of Charikar after they smelt an unusual odour and started feeling nauseous and dizzy, a 17-year-old victim told Reuters from her hospital bed. "I am pretty sure whoever has done this is against education for girls, but I strongly ask the parents not to be discouraged by such brutal action and send their children...

Note: The following text is a quote: April 26, 2009 Taliban bombs kill 16 children To which a Pakistani minister asserts, "The Taliban have exposed their real face by killing innocent children." His point, apparently, is that by killing children, the Taliban have proven that they are behaving un-Islamicly: after all, did the prophet himself not say that women and children should not be killed (only enslaved)? Yet, when jihadis asked Muhammad if it was permissible to attack infidel villages indiscriminately even if women and children were there, he flatly said, "They are from among them," which jurists have long...

Pakistan: Anonymous "miscreants" blow up girls' school Once again, the unknown miscreants vent their rage on girls' schools. Of course, had this report explained the stated goals of these "miscreants" -- the total application of sharia, including keeping females uneducated -- this story would make a bit more sense. "Miscreants blow up girls' school at Bannu," from Geo TV, April 5: BANNU: Some unidentified miscreants have blasted with explosives a girls' school in the town here. Sources said that the miscreants this morning blasted with a bang a girls’ school located in the vicinity of Miryan police station here by...

March 23, 2009 MARDAN: Unidentified men blew up a girls’ school in Mardan on Sunday. According to police sources, the men planted explosives near Government Girls High School Hattian, located near the residence of NWFP senior minister Rahim Dad Khan.

"Pakistan: Jihadists kill three women accused of supporting government, blow up two schools" SNIPPET: "MINGORA: Three women were killed in Swat on Thursday as Taliban continued their attack on people they consider to be pro-government. The militants also blew up two government schools. The women, Zarmina, Zarbibi and Farzana, were killed and three men were kidnapped when militants stormed their house in Dagai village and accused them of supporting security personnel manning the nearby Wenai bridge post. The girls’ primary school and boys’ high school were blown up in Nazarabad area of Matta."

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023577.php November 20, 2008 Pakistan: "Unknown miscreants" destroy girls' school Maybe they were Buddhists? Disgruntled nuns? At any rate, two women were also killed during clashes -- though none were sprayed in the face with acid, this time. "Pakistan: Girls school destroyed by militants," from AKI, November 20 (thanks to Jeffrey Imm): Mingora, 20 Nov. (AKI/DAWN) - Four militants and two women were killed and several others sustained injuries while a girls’ school was destroyed in Pakistan. The school was located in the area of Bar Bandai in the volatile Swat valley. Military...

Two men on a motorcycle used water pistols to spray acid on girls walking to school Wednesday in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, blinding at least two of them, military spokesmen said. U.S. Col. Greg Julian said Afghanistan's National Military Command Center told him that four girls were hurt in the incident. Two were blinded and remain hospitalized, and two were treated and released, he said. The men escaped after the attack, and no one claimed responsibility for it, but Arab-language network Al-Jazeera said Taliban militants were suspected to be responsible. The incident occurred about 8 a.m. near Mirwais...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- American soldiers discovered a girls' school being built north of Baghdad had become an explosives-rigged "death trap," the U.S. military said Thursday. The plot at the Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya was a "sophisticated and premeditated attempt to inflict massive casualties on our most innocent victims," military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said. The military suspects the plot was the work of al Qaeda, because of its nature and sophistication, Caldwell said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. The plot was uncovered Saturday, when troopers in the Salaheddin province found detonating wire across the street...

Lt. Col. Jabar, the operations officer for 2nd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 6th Iraqi army Division, speaks with a resident of Hamid Shaban during a visit from Iraqi army soldiers and their supporting U.S. military transition team to the Hamid Shaban GirlÂ’s School Feb. 15. The woman sought assistance from the Iraqi army in mediating a dispute with a neighbor over property. BAGHDAD -- The life of an Iraqi girl was forever changed in the chaotic aftermath following an improvised explosive device attack. The Hamid Shaban neighborhood in the district of Abu Ghraib was the target, but an innocent girl was...

The fire that wont go out,fire at girls school in Mecca has the fanatical Islamist and Saudi moderate leaders at loggerheads

Israeli girls schooled in survival Finding a haven in the middle of a war zone 03/19/2002 By GREGORY KATZ / The Dallas Morning News DOLEV, West Bank - Barbed wire. Bulletproof cars. Armed guards on patrol. Attack dogs tethered to the front gate. It looks like a maximum-security prison, but it's actually a school for troubled girls set in a remote Israeli settlement in the West Bank. BARBARA DAVIDSON / DMN The West Bank's Ultanat Dolev School caters to troubled girls. This is disputed land, claimed by both the Israelis and the Palestinians as their birthright, and the students...