New signs of progress in reducing prejudice

July 13, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

The movement away from intolerance and bigotry appears to be accelerating in substantial as well as symbolic ways, and not just in relation to the Confederate flag.

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Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, celebrated her 18th birthday in Lebanon on Sunday by opening a school for Syrian refugee girls and called on world leaders to invest in "books not bullets". Malala became a symbol of defiance after she was shot on a school bus in Pakistan 2012 by the Taliban for advocating girls' rights to education. She continued campaigning and won the Nobel in 2014. "I decided to be in Lebanon because I believe that the voices of the Syrian refugees need to be heard and they have been ignored for so long," Malala told Reuters in a schoolroom decorated with drawings of butterflies.

Serbia's prime minister was forced to flee a ceremony held to mark 20 years since the Srebrenica massacre on Saturday, when mourners hurled stones and bottles at him in what his government later described as an attempted assassination. Bodyguards surrounded Aleksandar Vucic and rushed him away through a crowd that turned on him moments after he entered the cemetery and laid flowers to 8,000 Muslim men and boys executed after the U.N. safe haven fell to Bosnian Serb forces towards the end of the 1992-95 war. Stones and bottles were thrown from the crowd, some of whom were heard to cry "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest), in an attack underscoring the depth of anger over Belgrade's denial of the massacre as genocide.

At least 10 people were killed in air strikes overnight in Yemen, relatives and medical sources said, as a Saudi-led coalition continued bombing the capital on Sunday in violation of a temporary humanitarian truce. The United Nations-brokered pause in the fighting was meant to last a week to allow aid deliveries to the country's 21 million people who have endured more than three months of bombing and civil war. But a family of eight traveling in several vehicles were killed in an air strike on Saturday night in the central province of al-Baida, and two other civilians were killed in the southern city of Taiz.

Some of the Uighurs deported to China last week from Thailand had planned to go to Syria and Iraq to carry out jihad, state television said, showing pictures of them being bundled out of an aircraft with black hoods over their heads. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Uighurs keen to escape unrest in China's western Xinjiang region have traveled clandestinely via Southeast Asia to Turkey. China is home to about 20 million Muslims spread across its vast territory, only a portion of whom are Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and are from Xinjiang.

For the second year in a row, Novak Djokovic solved Roger Federer's superb serve in the Wimbledon final. And for the second year in a row, Djokovic claimed the championship at the grass-court Grand Slam tournament, preventing Federer from earning a record eighth. The match was as even as possible through two sets, before the No. 1-seeded Djokovic grabbed ahold of it and wouldn't let go, generating four service breaks that carried him past Federer 7-6 (1), 6-7 (10), 6-4, 6-3 on Sunday for his third title at Wimbledon and ninth Grand Slam trophy overall.

The national board of directors of prominent U.S. civil rights group the NAACP voted on Saturday to end its 15-year boycott of South Carolina prompted by the display of the Confederate battle flag on state capitol grounds. "Emergency resolution passed by the NAACP National Board of Directors at #NAACP106, ending the 15 year South Carolina boycott," the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said on its Twitter feed. The resolution was approved during the NAACP's annual convention in Philadelphia. South Carolina removed the flag on Friday to chants of "USA, USA!," after three weeks of emotional debate over the banner, a symbol of slavery and racism to many, but of Southern heritage and pride to others.

“The object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” – Mary Baker Eddy

The Daily News Briefing is published Monday through Friday by The Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, Massachusetts.

To send a comment to the Editor, email editor@csmonitor.com.

“The object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” – Mary Baker Eddy

The Daily News Briefing is published Monday through Friday by The Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, Massachusetts.

To send a comment to the Editor, email editor@csmonitor.com.

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