Malala Yousafzai, the teenager who was shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school but miraculously survived, is to meet some of the kidnapped girls who escaped from Boko Haram.  The 17-year-old, who is now a women's rights campaigner, travelled to Nigeria to help draw attention to their cause.

One of Pakistan’s leading women’s rights campaigners saysMalala Yousafzai is a victim of the West. Humaira Awais Shahid, a former politician, Harvard fellow, and newspaper editor, said the schoolgirl has been badly damaged by Britain and America, who are taking advantage of her survival story. 

Public diplomacy fans should read the list of the 10 biggest public diplomacy stories of last year. Thanks to the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy, we can see the global trends and how public diplomats are responding to those trends.

CPD announces the 10 most significant public diplomacy stories of 2013 as part of its review of global trends that are shaping the field. To narrow our list of 1,500 stories to 50, we took into account the following factors: the frequency of the story being covered in various news sources, the implications of the public diplomacy event, the credibility of sources publishing the news about the PD moment, and the frequency of an actor’s participation in public diplomacy activities either as the initiator or receiver of public diplomacy.

Malala Yousafzai has topped a list of the 101 most powerful British Asians and Asians resident in the UK, knocking Labour MP Keith Vaz off the number one spot he held last year. Yousafzai, who came to Britain from Pakistan after she was shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning for girls’ education, is the only woman to feature in the top ten.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection Friday morning and it wasn't Malala. (The prize went to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.) To find out how that news was received among school girls, I stopped by the Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT) — a public high school near Cape Town, South Africa, that I have been profiling this year.

If you want to change the world, invest in a girl. Today marks the second anniversary of International Day of the Girl, instituted by the United Nations General Assembly to promote the rights of girls, highlight the unique challenges they face around the world, and reaffirm a global commitment to protect and empower them. Given worldwide violence, extremism, poverty, and injustice, we cannot afford to cast aside the contributions that 850 million girls can make to build a safer, more prosperous, and equitable world.

Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai has become a formidable force for rights in the year since the Taliban shot her, but an equally formidable public relations operation has helped her spread her message. The 16-year-old campaigner for girls' education has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, addressed the UN, published an autobiography and been invited to tea with Queen Elizabeth II, achieving a level of fame more like that of a movie star.