Beenish Javed

Malala Yousafzai is a fourteen year old girl of Swat, Pakistan. She has recently been awarded the first National Peace Award of Pakistan. The award in future will  be associated with Malala's name. Between 2007 and 2009,  there was a military operation going on in Swat against militants. Militants were bombing girls's schools throughout Swat, and killing people who were favoring the military and government of pakistan.This was the time when people were shifting to other cities, when people had hidden themselves in their homes. But Malala was brave enough to talk to national and international media. She openely talked about girls education, how harmful bombing girls schools would be. She became a part of Newyork Times documentaries , A school girl's odyessy , and A class dismissed in Swat . She also was a regular writer for BBC Urdu website. On 20th Decemeber 2011, she  recieved Pakistan's first peace award, in recognition of her services to raise awareness abou...

              I got a chance to interview Mark Stroh, spokesperson of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, for ARY NEWS. Following is the summary of the interview.              The U.S. says its not cutting the military aid of 700 million dollars nor it is freezing the aid to Pakistan. The senate has passed a defence authorisation bill, which bounds Pakistan to cooperate with the U.S. in combating the IED's, which have been a primary sources of deaths of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. If the defence departement of U.S. sends a report to the congress that Pakistan is cooperating than the aid money will go to Pakistan. This bill will most likely be soon signed by President Obama, and than Pakistan would be bound to control the flow of IED's to Afghanistan. Experts of International affairs, here in Islamabad have been talking about a clear shift in Pakistan's po...

On Tuesday 21st Sep 2010 Sarah, my friend who also works as a news reporter called me to join her on a day trip to Swat. I was a bit reluctant to accept the invitation as I had taken three days off with the Eid holidays to attend quite an amazing wedding in Peshawar. But somehow she convinced me and I was ready for an adventurous trip. So early in the morning at around 7 we got in to a 20.5 million armored vehicle. This was World food program’s car.  We were traveling with them as media reporters to cover their projects in Swat. This seemed to be a cool, comfortable car and I was just excited to travel in an armored vehicleJ. Anyway we had a pretty good ride to Swat without any lunch break we went to a village where we met the WFP people, they served us food in a small village house. It was nice they served us fruit which they picked from the tree in their home. It was a very simple home, the women in that home couldn’t speak Urdu and the girls there had only stu...