WEEK6

Paris terror attack: Timeline

French father explains terror attacks to young son in heartbreaking video

November 17, 2015

    Heavily armed men shouting “Allahu Akbar” have stormed the Paris headquarters of a satirical weekly, killing 12 people in the worst attack in France in decades.

     

    At around 11:20am, two masked Kalashnikov-wielding men dressed in black commando-style gear burst into number 6 rue Nicolas-Appert in a Paris neighbourhood, where the archives of the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly are based.“Is this Charlie Hebdo?” they shouted, before realising they had got the wrong address.Moving quickly down the road to number 10, they fired at reception staff and went to the second floor where journalists and cartoonists were holding an editorial conference.

“The two men opened fire and coldly killed the people in the conference room, as well as the police officer in charge of protecting (cartoonist) Charb, who did not have time to react,” said a police source.Only one person survived, by hiding under the table. The witness heard the pair cry “we have avenged the prophet” and “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest).At 11:30am, police received reports of gunshots at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters and immediately dispatched officers to the scene.The gunmen fled, again crying “Allahu akbar”, and came face-to-face with police, with a firefight ensuing.They climbed into a black Citroen C3 car and exchanged fire with another police vehicle, shooting it around a dozen times without injuring the officers inside.

    According to chilling amateur video footage, the killers went about their deadly work with bloodcurdling calm — striding with guns held before them and scanning the streets for targets, before unflinchingly executing an injured police officer sprawled on the pavement as he held his hand aloft in an apparent attempt to shield himself.“You were going to kill me!” the gunman said before pulling the trigger. The two killers then cast another look around and slowly went towards their waiting getaway car, where the figure on the passenger side paused to scoop up what appeared to be a gun that had fallen to the ground before jumping in.Bystanders near the newspaper office with the presence of mind and courage to record videos or take photos of the violence captured a pedestrian crouching between parked cars after apparently spotting the killers advancing up the street.

The assassins drove off with the same calm as they had methodically carried out their strike.

Shortly after, the gunmen had a violent crash with a Volkswagen, injuring the driver.They tried to continue but were forced to abandon their damaged vehicle at Porte de Pantin, hijacking another car and fleeing towards the north of the capital.Police say they have mobilised a huge number of officers to follow the trail of the gunmen but that details of the investigation are currently confidential.

 

WEEK 5
Next Up for Alibaba: The Giant 'Singles Day' Sales
November 05, 2014

    So far, Alibaba (BABA) is doing a good job living up to the hype that surrounded its record-setting initial public offering. The Chinese e-commerce company yesterday, Nov. 4, reported its first earnings numbers since its IPO raised a record $25 billion in September, and Alibaba’s sales for the quarter increased 54 percent, to 16.8 billion yuan. Although higher costs for integration of newly acquired businesses and other marketing expenses helped drive its earnings down 39 percent, to 3 billion yuan, that result was still better than many analysts had expected.“The China retail business is proving to be a powerhouse,” wrote Rob Sanderson, managing director with MKM Partners, in a report published Nov. 4. China’s market, he added, offers “impressive growth even at a very large scale.”
    Now that Alibaba has reported its first results as a public company, the next big event for the Chinese e-commerce giant comes with the fifth annual Nov. 11 “Singles Day” sale. Alibaba came up with the gimmick of using 11-11 to market to unmarried people, and it has quickly become a hit: Last year, the company’s sales on Nov. 11 spiked 83 percent compared with the previous year, to a record 35 billion yuan ($5.7 billion).Just how successful has Alibaba been with Singles Day? That turnover last year was more than twice the gross merchandise volume of all U.S. sales online during the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, according to Jeff Walters, a Beijing-based partner with Boston Consulting Group. As other Chinese retailers have jumped on the Singles Day bandwagon, total online spending on Nov. 11 last year was around 50 billion yuan.
    This year should be even bigger, thanks to the growing acceptance of the Internet among Chinese consumers. The total number of shoppers online has increased about 20 percent, to around 360 million, according to BCG, which expects Alibaba’s TMall and Taobao to account for 70 percent to 80 percent of Singles Day transactions. China’s post office is prepared to deliver more than 90 million packages daily “one or two days after Nov. 11,” the People’s Daily reported yesterday. That’s about 40 percent more than last year.Many newcomers are getting into the Singles Day action this year, with more than 30 automakers, apparel brands, and other companies taking part in Alibaba’s sales event next week. For instance, Tesla Motors (TSLA) will sell begin sales of its Model S on Nov. 11. Zara (ITX:SM) will participate for the first time, too, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Praveen Menon and Ji Shi wrote in a report published Nov. 4.Some retailers may be in for a bit of a disappointment. With only about 25 percent of the Chinese population shopping online, Singles Day creates an opportunity for Alibaba and its rivals to get new customers used to the idea of buying goods over the Internet. “The loud promotion of Singles Day across the internet helps [persuade] many of China’s netizens to try e-commerce for the first time,” BCG’s Walters reports. While the number of shoppers will surely increase, the amount each one spends is likely to drop 15 percent, “because promotions are becoming more common throughout the year, making Singles Day less ‘special.’”
    Still, Alibaba isn’t giving up on its marketing gimmick. With such Chinese rivals as JD.com (JD) offering more Nov. 11 sales of their own, Alibaba is trying keep its edge by turning Singles Day into a worldwide event. The company plans to offer more than 1 million items to consumers outside China, it said in a Nov. 4 statement on its Alizila website.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-11-05/alibaba-looks-ahead-to-single

Structure of the lead:
WHAT-Single's Day 
WHEN-Nov. 11
WHO-Alibaba
WHERE-China
WHY-not given
HOW-online shopping

Key words:

1. hype  炒作；大肆宣傳
2. integration  綜合；整合
3. retail  零售
4. powerhouse  有勢力的團體
5. gimmick  花招；噱頭
6. spike  制止；阻撓
7. bandwagon  流行；時尚
8. transaction  辦理；業務
9. apparel  服裝
10. netizen  網民

WEEK4  

Walter Palmer: Cecil the lion killer revealed to be American dentist

• Thursday 30 July 2015

The tourist who paid thousands of pounds to kill one of Zimbabwe’s most cherished lions has been identified as an American dentist.

Authorities in Zimbabwe say Walter Palmer, from Minneapolis, paid a $55,000 (£35,000) bribe to wildlife guides to allow him to shoot the lion, named Cecil, with a crossbow.

The 13-year-old animal was found beheaded and skinned near the Hwange National Park, where he was beloved by tourists and local residents alike.

Dr Palmer, who is described as an “experienced general and cosmetic dentist” on his practice’s website, is married with two children.

His professional biography describes his enjoyment of “outdoor activities”, adding: “Anything allowing him to stay active and observe and photograph wildlife is where you will find Dr Palmer when he is not in the office.”

The dentist’s Facebook page was being inundated with angry comments and threats today as he was identified as Cecil’s killer.

“Nothing in this world would give me greater pleasure than to see your head mounted on a wall, your carcass defiled, degraded and paraded as you did to Cecil and near countless other animals,” one person wrote.

Johnny Rodrigues, chairman for Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, identified Mr Palmer to The Independent and said anyone convicted of involvement in the illegal hunt could face up to 10 years in prison.

He added: “The head – his trophy – has been impounded and confiscated as evidence for the court in Victoria Falls”.

Mr Rodrigues had previously described Cecil as “one of the most beautiful animals to look at” and said he “never bothered anybody”.

Zimbabwe, like many African countries, is battling to curb illegal hunting and poaching threatening its endangered wildlife and conservationists fear Cecil’s death will have a knock-on effect.

The lion’s cubs could die as other male lions take his place in the pride and kill the lionesses’ offspring in to encourage them to mate.

Mr Palmer and his accomplices are believed to have lured Cecil out of the protection of the national park using bait and shot him with the bow – a silent weapon increasingly used by hunters trying to evade arrest.

But the arrow did not kill the lion immediately. Tracking data from his GPS collar linked to researchers at Oxford University showed he was followed for 40 hours before being shot dead with a rifle.

The Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association confirmed in a Facebook post last week that the hunter in charge of the safari was one of its members and had been suspended.

“ZPHGA reiterates it will not tolerate any illegal hunting or any unethical practices by any of its members and their staff,” a statement said.

A guide from local firm Bushman Safaris and the owner of the land where Cecil died have been arrested over the killing on 6 July.

Hunter Theo Bronchorst and landowner Honest Trymore Ndlovu were due to face illegal hunting charges in a court in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZPWM) said.

On its Facebook page, Bushman Safaris describes itself as a family business offering “top quality hunts with maximum results”, specialising in killing lepoards.

“Hunters do far more for conservation of our wildlife than anti-hunters whom probably almost 100% have never even seen or been around our wildlife,” a post said earlier this year.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/walter-palmer-american-dentist-revealed-as-killer-of-cecil-the-lion-in-zimbabwe-10421746.html

Structure of the Lead:
WHAT-kill Zimbabwe’s most cherished lion
WHEN-July 2015
WHO-Walter Palmer
WHERE-Zimbabwe 
WHY-not given
HOW-not given

KEY WORDS:

1. crossbow  石弓；弩
2. inundate  氾濫；壓倒
3. mount  展出；架置
4. carcass  殘骸；軀體
5. defile  玷汙；污損
6. trophy  戰利品
7. impound  沒收
8. confiscate  充公
9. curb  克制；約束
10. evade  逃避

WEEK 3
Transcript of Commencement Speech at Standford given by Steve Jobs
14 June 2005    

     Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now. This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you all, very much.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1422863/posts

Structure of the Lead:
WHAT-inspiring speech
WHERE-Standford University
WHO-Steve Jobs
WHEN-June 2005
WHY-graduation ceremony
HOW-speech

Key Words:

1. commencement  開始；畢業典禮
2. relent  變溫和
3. deposit  訂金
4. calligraphy  書法
5. typography  印刷樣式
6. diagnose  診斷
7. biopsy  切片檢查法
8. endoscope  內診鏡
9. hungry  渴望的；熱望的

WEEK 2

Fifa corruption scandal: Sepp Blatter questioned over payment to Michel Platini

28 May 2015

    Sepp Blatter, the most powerful man in world football, was under criminal investigation on Friday as police probing the Fifa corruption scandal questioned him over an allegedly illicit £1.3m payment. Swiss prosecutors questioned the 79-year-old Fifa president over allegations that he made a “disloyal payment” of £1.3 million, to Michel Platini, the French-born head of Uefa, and the man who is currently seeking to succeed him.

• Sepp Blatter under criminal investigation at Fifa - live

The payment allegedly relates to work Mr Platini carried out during 1998-2002 and was paid to the Frenchman in 2011. On Friday he said he was under contract to Fifa at the time and denied any wrongdoing. Before becoming the head of European football in 2007, Mr Platini had worked as a paid official for Fifa and helped secure Mr Blatter’s re-election as president in 2002. Mr Blatter is also being investigated over a TV rights deal involving his former colleague, Jack Warner, who has been indicted on racketeering charges. Mr Blatter’s questioning comes five months after the organisation he has headed since 1998 was engulfed in allegations of corruption. His office at Fifa headquarters in Zurich was also searched by police who seized 'data' in connection with their investigation. News of his questioning came just before Mr Blatter was due to give a press conference at FIFA headquarters in Zurich. Investigations by Swiss authorities and the FBI were launched in May over claims of bungs and illegal payments connected to the awarding of World Cups and sponsorship deals, including the awards of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. Fourteen officials and sports marketing executives, including some of his closest colleagues were indicted, but Mr Blatter managed to rise above the storm and even sought and won re-election.

• Sepp Blatter timeline: Fifa president's controversial career

However, despite denying any wrongdoing, he announced in the wake of the arrests that he would step down in February 2016, as he no longer had the support of everyone in the game. In a statement the Swiss Attorney General’s office explained that the investigation into Mr Blatter would focus on two main strands. One part of the investigation is probing a large payment that was made by Mr Blatter to Mr Platini, a former ally, who in recent years has sought to distance himself. While the payment was made just four years ago it is thought to relate to work the former French midfielder did for Fifa between 1998 and 2002.Investigators stressed that Mr Platini was not under criminal investigation and was being treated as a witness, but the development is expected to severely damage his bid to win the Fifa Presidency in elections planned for February. In a statement, Mr Platini said: "Today I was asked by the Swiss authorities to provide information relating to the ongoing investigations surrounding FIFA. I have always been open to supporting the relevant bodies and authorities in their investigative work and therefore cooperated fully. "Regarding the payment that was made to me, I wish to state that this amount relates to work which I carried out under a contract with Fifa and I was pleased to have been able to clarify all matters relating to this with the authorities. "Today I also made clear to the Swiss authorities that since I live in Switzerland I am available to speak with them any time to clarify any matters relating to the investigations. "Investigators will seek to establish whether the £1.3 million payment was for work conducted during that period, and if so why it took nine years for the money to be transferred. Sources within the Football Association, which recently endorsed Mr Platini’s bid for the presidency, said its position had not changed.Mr Blatter is also facing allegations of “financial mismanagement or misappropriation” in connection with a TV rights deal he signed in 2005 with Mr Warner, who was then the President of the Caribbean Football Union. The allegations are understood to centre on claims that Mr Blatter sold the regional rights to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa for far below the market value, allowing Mr Warner to sell them on at a huge profit. But Damian Collins, the Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe who has campaigned for Fifa reform, said that Mr Platini needed to explain the payment from Mr Blatter. He said: “Mr Platini is in a difficult position. He will need to explain why he accepted this money and what is was for. “The next President of Fifa should not be tainted by the problems of the past. This payment adds personal pressure on Mr Platini. This payment looks very bad.” Despite the fact that Mr Blatter is now at the centre of a criminal investigation, Fifa sources said the president of the organisation would not be suspended from his role. This is in contrast to the secretary general, Jerome Valcke, who was suspended earlier this month after being implicated in a ticket selling scam. Clive Efford MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Sport, said it had been a mistake to allow Mr Blatter to remain in post after the scandal blew up in May. He said: “It was always impossible to envisage circumstances where Sepp Blatter, at the head of Fifa with its highly-centralised structure, was completely unaware of the corruption that was going on around him.”“This begs the question why Sepp Blatter was allowed to stay in post after he had been forced to announce his resignation. Has he been using his time to remove evidence?”Mr Blatter’s US lawyer insisted that his client had nothing to hide and was cooperating fully with investigators.Attorney Richard Cullen said the contract relating to television rights had been “properly prepared and negotiated by the appropriate staff members of FIFA. Certainly no mismanagement occurred.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/sepp-blatter/11892504/Fifa-corruption-scandal-Sepp-Blatter-questioned-over-payment-to-Michel-Platini.html

Structure of the Lead：
WHAT-Fifa  scandal
WHY-corruption
WHEN-May 2015
WHERE-not given
WHO-Sepp Blatter 
HOW-Fifa  is indicted and fined

Key Words:

1. probe  調查
2. corruption  貪汙；腐敗
3. allegation  主張；斷言
4. illicit  非法的
5. prosecutor原告；起訴人
6. indict  指控
7. racketeering詐騙；敲詐
8. engulf  吞沒；捲入
9. ally  (使)結盟；(使)聯合
10. taint  玷汙；敗壞
11. envisage  面對；正視

WEEK 1 Malala Yousafzai

10 December 2014

    It has only been five years since Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai wrote an anonymous diary about life under Taliban rule in north-west Pakistan. Since then she has been shot in the head by the militants, and has become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Accepting the award in Oslo on 10 December, she said she was "humbled" and proud to be the first Pashtun and the first Pakistani to win the prize. She also joked that she was probably the first winner who still fought with her younger brothers. Malala Yousafzai first came to public attention through that heartfelt diary, published on BBC Urdu, which chronicled her desire to remain in education and for girls to have the chance to be educated. When she was shot in the head in October 2012 by a Taliban gunman, she was already well known in Pakistan, but that one shocking act catapulted her to international fame. She survived the dramatic assault, in which a militant boarded her school bus in Pakistan's north-western Swat valley and opened fire, wounding two of her school friends as well.

The story of her recovery - from delicate surgery at a Pakistani military hospital to further operations and rehabilitation in the UK, and afterwards as she took her campaign global - has been closely tracked by the world's media. She was discharged from hospital in January 2013 and her life now is unimaginably different to anything she may have envisaged when she was an anonymous voice chronicling the fears of schoolgirls under the shadow of the Taliban.

Image caption After initial surgery in Pakistan Malala Yousafzai was sent to hospital in UK to complete her treatment recovery

She was named one of TIME magazine's most influential people in 2013, put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013, won the European Parliament's Sakharov price for Freedom of Thought and her autobiography "I Am Malala" was released last year, and reversioned for younger audiences. Malala was only 11 years old when her anonymous diary captivated audiences. She wrote under a pseudonym - Gul Makai, the name of a heroine from a Pashtun folk tale. Militants destroyed scores of girls schools in the time the Taliban wielded power over the valley. They had an implacable attitude to female education and this was Malala's primary concern. In January 2009, as the school was closing for winter holiday she wrote: "The girls were not too excited about vacations because they knew if the Taliban implemented their edict [banning girls' education] they would not be able to come to school again. I am of the view that the school will one day reopen but while leaving I looked at the building as if I would not come here again." Image captionSince her recovery, Malala's campaign for global education has taken her around the world She documented the anxiety she and her friends felt as they saw students dropping away from class for fear of being targeted by militants, and as the girls began to attend school in plain clothes not uniform, so as not to draw attention to themselves. Eventually, Malala and her family, like many thousands of other Swat residents, fled the valley when a government military operation attempted to clear the region of militancy.

Passionate campaigner
Malala consistently received support and encouragement in her activism from her parents. The idea for the blog was even that of her father Ziauddin, who ran a local private school. In a lengthy profile published in Vanity Fair magazine, one teacher from Swat said that her father "encouraged Malala to speak freely and learn everything she could". And her identity as the girl blogger from Swat eventually became known as she became more vocal on the subject of the right of girls to education. It is a subject she never ceased to be passionate about even after she returned home once the militants had been run out of Swat. In 2009 a documentary film was even made about her. Many more honours followed: in 2011 she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by The KidsRights Foundation and in 2012 the Pakistani government awarded her the National Peace Award-subsequently renamed the National Malala Peace Prize - for those under 18 years old. Image caption Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, has been an essential support in her campaign She even confronted then US special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, urging him to do something about the state of affairs for women who want an education. When she finally returned to Swat, Malala took advantage of the improved security and went back to school. Malala and her family were the subject of threats and it was on 9 October 2012 that these were borne out. The Taliban said that they targeted her for "promoting secular education" and threatened to attack her again.

Back at school

Image captionIn the end, Malala remains a school girl determined to complete her education. The bullet hit Malala's left brow and instead of penetrating her skull it travelled underneath the skin, the length of the side of her head and into her shoulder. Amid the outpouring of global support she was flown to the UK and at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the city of Birmingham she received specialist treatment and had a titanium plate fitted as well as a cochlear implant in her skull to help her hear. She began attending Edgbaston High School in March and her father has been given a job with the Pakistani consulate in Birmingham for three years. But she has continued her campaign and taken it around the world. A fund set up in her name helps children in education around the world. Among other trips, she has travelled to Nigeria, meeting President Goodluck Jonathan to press for action to free the 200 girls held by Boko Haram Islamist militants. It is all a far cry from the girl who wrote in her diary only four years ago: "Today, I also read my diary written for the BBC in Urdu. My mother liked my pen name Gul Makai. I also like the name because my real name means 'grief stricken'."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23241937

Structure of the Lead：
 WHAT-Malala was shot

  WHY-Fighting for the right of girls education.
  WHEN-October 2012
  WHERE-Asia
  WHO-Malala Yousafzai 
   HOW-public diary on BBC Urdu

Key Words:
1.anonymous 匿名的
2.chronicle 敘述
3.catapult 發射;彈弓
4.rehabilitation 修復;康復
5.unimaginably 難以想像地
6.envisage 想像;面對
7.pseudonym 筆名;匿名
8.implacable 難平息的
9.envoy 使節;特使
10.secular 不朽的
11. penetrate打動