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Syrian army and security officers have detained and tortured children with impunity during the past year, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented at least 12 cases of children detained under inhumane conditions and tortured, as well as children shot while in their homes or on the street. Human Rights Watch has also documented government use of schools as detention centres, military bases or barracks, and sniper posts, as well as the arrest of children from schools.

“Children have not been spared the horror of Syria’s crackdown,” said Lois Whitman, children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Syrian security forces have killed, arrested, and tortured children in their homes, their schools, or on the streets. In many cases, security forces have targeted children just as they have targeted adults.”

Some of the arrests took place in schools. “Nazih” (not her real name), a 17-year-old girl from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that in May 2011, security forces entered her school and arrested all the boys in her class, after questioning them about the anti-regime slogans painted on the school walls.

According to a February study by the Inter-American Development Bank, the cost of physical damage from Haiti’s earthquake ranges from $8 billion to $13 billion. It says, “there are few events of such ferocity as the Haiti 2010 earthquake.”

The study looks at natural disasters over the past 40 years and concludes that the death toll, per capita, of Haiti’s earthquake is four times, or more, higher than any other disaster in this time period.

The Partners In Health agency estimates some 1.3 million people were left without shelter by the earthquake. The majority of those people still do not have adequate emergency shelter nor access to potable water, food and medical attention.

Kicking off a campaign aimed at making March “the month that Pakistan talks about only two things: education and cricket”, a government commission has painted a damning picture of the country’s education system, whose poor progress towards global learning goals has been documented in the Education for All Global Monitoring Report.

the Pakistan Education Task Force says the country “is in the midst of an educational emergency with disastrous human and economic consequences.”

The report quotes the 2010 Global Monitoring Report’s finding that “30% of Pakistanis live in extreme educational poverty – having received less than two years of education.”

Hundreds of people, including many women and children, were killed in ethnic violence near the city of Jos in Nigeria at the weekend, officials say.They said villages had been attacked by men with machetes who came from nearby hills. Troops have now been deployed in the area and dozens of arrests are said to have been made.

Jos has been under a military curfew since January when at least 200 people died in clashes between Christians and Muslims.

The authorities say the villages are now calm after troops and military vehicles entered them. An adviser to the Christian-dominated Plateau state government, Dan Manjang, told AFP: "We have been able to make 95 arrests but at the same time over 500 people have been killed in this heinous act."

This is a war zone. Families in the sprawling camp have lost everything – everything that is except a drive to get their kids an education. In the midst of the most abject poverty, parents have come together to build makeshift classrooms, hire a teacher, and buy a blackboard. Many of the kids work in the afternoon, selling charcoal to pay the $1 fee charged every term. “Being in school is fun – and people with an education can have a better life. I’ll be a doctor,” says David Ichange, aged 12.

If every girl in sub-Saharan Africa had a secondary education, it would cut under-five deaths by around 1.8 million. The reason: educated mothers are empowered to demand better health and nutrition provision.

The same holds for cutting poverty. If every child in a low income country got into school and left with basic reading skills, the growth effects would lift 171 million people out of poverty. That’s a 12% decline.

Education under Attack  Students and educators in situations of armed conflict face violence every day. Schools and universities should be safe havens, where they can work toward a better future. Instead in many places they have become the targets of violent attacks for political, military, ideological, sectarian, ethnic, religious or criminal reasons. Students, teachers and academics are putting their lives at risk simply by showing up. A UNESCO study found intentional attacks of these types by state security forces or non-state armed groups in at least 31 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East between 2007 and 2009.Our vision We seek to establish a world in which all who wish to learn, teach and research, at all levels and in all forms of education, and all those who support them, can do so in conditions of safety, security, dignity and equality, free from fear, consistent with the principles of mutual understanding, peace, tolerance and academic freedom.Our mission To catalyse enhanced prevention of attacks on education, effective response to attacks, improved knowledge and understanding, better monitoring and reporting, stronger international norms and standards,and increased accountability.

Teaching peace also places importance on the process of education, i.e. the structure of the classroom, shared power between teacher and student, and a cooperative, co-creative learning process where factors like race, religion, background and learning ability are honored as swaths of fabric in a colorful cultural quil

he case of the Program Pendidikan Damai , a peace education program specifically designed for the province of Aceh, Indonesia, is a good example of a culture of teaching peace. In response to the pandemic brutal war between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian military which has caught tens of thousands of civilians in the crossfire, local educators solicited the advice of international non-governmental organizations in creating a curriculum rooted in principles of nonviolence. The curriculum incorporates tenets of Islamic teaching as well as Acehnese culture, and is thus aptly relevant to the students who, frustrated with the level of violence in their cities and countrysides, decided to participate in workshops and trainings to learn how they can be agents of positive change in their communities. The local schools have adopted the curriculum and have begun teaching the lessons during school hours.

teaching peace gives students the tools to constructively deal with the problems they encounter on both a personal and global level, and it helps them understand their responsibility for elevating the collective human experience.

Nigeria's acting president should make sure that the massacre of at least 200 Christian villagers in central Nigeria on March 7, 2010, is thoroughly and promptly investigated and that those responsible are prosecuted, Human Rights Watch said today.

The latest killings in Nigeria's restive Plateau State took place in the early morning hours of March 7, when groups of men armed with guns, machetes, and knives attacked residents of the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot, and Ratsat, 10 kilometers south of Jos, the capital of Plateau State. The dead included scores of women and children.

"This kind of terrible violence has left thousands dead in Plateau State in the past decade, but no one has been held accountable," said Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Children and school buildings are increasingly becoming targets in conflicts across the world, warns Save the Children as one of the key findings of a report published today.

The organisation finds that the risks of violence to schoolchildren in conflict-blighted areas are on the rise as schools are increasingly used as symbolic, easy targets by armed groups. These risks to children will continue to grow unless the international community takes urgent action to protect them from attack.

The report - The Future is Now - points out that civilians now make up more than 90% of casualties in the world's conflicts and about half of those are children. It warns that education is under attack by armed militias, criminal groups and even governments through the bombing of schools and is threatened by military interference in humanitarian work - all of which put children's lives in danger.

CAIRO - Fatema Salah said her students had never sung the Egyptian national anthem quite the way they did Sunday, the first day back to school for most Cairo pupils. Before, they shuffled through the morning ritual, heads down and sleepy. This time, standing in the school's shady courtyard for the first time since the revolution, they belted it out.

"Today, everybody sang loud," said Salah, principal of the Dar El Tarbiah School, a secondary school in central Cairo. "It was real. Many of them were in [Tahrir] Square themselves. They are very proud."

But with the pride, nervousness remained. Nearly half of Salah's students were absent, and across the city thousands of families ignored the reopening of school, which had been anticipated as a step toward post-revolution normality.

LHASA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The government is planning to raise the higher education gross enrollment rate in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region to 30 percent in less than five years, meaning that three out of every 10 Tibetan students will enter college by 2015, local officials said Monday as Vice President Xi Jinping inspected Tibet University.

More than 31,000 students, mostly ethnic Tibetans, currently study in Tibet's six universities and junior colleges. Of them, 718 are pursuing post-graduate degrees. In addition, many students from Tibet are studying in universities outside the region, officials said.

Tibet's first modern primary school opened in Lhasa in 1952; the first secondary school opened four years later with significant government investment. In the 1970s, Tubdain Kaizhub attended a county-level high school near Lhasa, where courses were mainly taught in Tibetan. He managed to pick up Mandarin Chinese, the most widely-used language in China, from his neighbors in a military compound.

ADEN, Yemen, 15 September 2011 – It is the fourth day of Ramadan in Aden, a port city in the south of Yemen, and the temperature has reached over 40 degrees centigrade. Although it is summer holiday, the yard of Belqis School in Aden is full of children. Some play under the sun, while others attend educational sessions in a tent organized by UNICEF. The children are from families displaced by fighting in the restive region of Abyan between government troops and militants suspected of links to al-Qaeda.

Classrooms that once were filled with desks and chairs have now become makeshift homes, with some rooms accommodating up to 24 people.

“The sound of the aircraft is still in my ears day and night,” she said. “There were heavy steps coming closer and closer to our door and then suddenly my father opened the door and a guy wearing a military uniform asked us to leave.” Amani added sadly, “I still remember my mother crying, refusing to leave.”

“We arrived at school at 7:30 a.m. as we always do on a school day. At exactly 8:30 we could hear shooting coming from the direction of a neighbouring village,” recalls Pafait Guei, a 14-year-old boy in sixth grade, who usually attends Beoua village primary school in western Côte d’Ivoire.

Pafait and his friends have not been in school since that day, on 17 March. Côte d’Ivoire has been through political crisis and violence following disputed presidential elections last year. Although the political deadlock has been resolved with the new President, Alassane Outtara, sworn in, there is still a tremendous push required to restore the volatile situation in the country.

UNICEF, with the support of the Government of Côte d’Ivoire and its partners, has been targeting one million children for the national ‘Back to School’ campaign in the 10 most vulnerable regions in the western and southern parts of the country.