A wounded Pakistani girl, Malala Yousufzai, is moved to a helicopter to be taken to Peshawar for treatment in Mingora, Swat Valley, Pakistan on Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012. A Taliban gunman walked up to a bus taking children home from school in Pakistan’s volatile Swat Valley Tuesday and shot and wounded a 14-year-old activist known for championing the education of girls and publicizing atrocities committed by the Taliban, officials said. (AP Photo/Sherin Zada)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Many schools in Pakistan's Swat Valley closed their doors in protest Wednesday and the country's army chief vowed to fight on against militants as anger erupted across the nation over the Taliban attack on a 14-year-old activist famed for promoting girls' education.

Malala Yousufzai was in the intensive care unit at a military hospital in Peshawar, recovering from an early morning surgery to remove a bullet from her neck a day after the attack. A Pakistani official said doctors thought she was out of danger.

The shooting of Malala on her way home from school Tuesday in the town of Mingora in the volatile Swat Valley horrified Pakistanis across the religious, political and ethnic spectrum. A Taliban gunman walked up to a bus taking schoolchildren and shot her in the head and neck. Another girl on the bus was also wounded.

The country's top military officer, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, issued a strongly-worded statement condemning the attack. The powerful army chief rarely makes such public pronouncements, even when it comes to strictly military matters.

"In attacking Malala, the terrorist have failed to grasp that she is not only an individual, but an icon of courage and hope who vindicates the great sacrifices that the people of Swat and the nation gave, for wresting the valley from the scourge of terrorism," Kayani said.

He vowed the military would not bow to terrorists like those who shot the young activist.

"We will fight, regardless of the cost we will prevail," he said.

He also visited the hospital to get a first-hand account of her condition, the statement said.

Malala is admired across Pakistan for exposing the Taliban's atrocities and advocating for girls' education in the face of religious extremism.

She began writing a blog when she was just 11 under a pseudonym for the BBC about life under the Taliban, and began speaking out publicly in 2009 about the need for girls' education. The Taliban strongly opposes education for women, and the group has claimed responsibility for the Tuesday attack.

Private schools in the Swat Valley were closed Wednesday in a sign of protest over the shooting and in solidarity with Malala, said Ahmed Shah, the chairman of an association of private schools. Flags in front of the Mingora government headquarters were at half-staff, and police officers stood guard outside her family's house.

A demonstration was expected to be held later Wednesday at the press club in Mingora and another one was under way in the eastern city of Lahore. In the southern port city of Karachi, the city's main political party, Muttahida Qaumi Movement, was having a service at their headquarters to pray for the girl's recovery.

The front pages of both English- and Urdu-language newspapers were plastered with stories and pictures of Malala. Television channels constantly replayed footage of her being taken to the hospital in Peshawar as well as clips from previous appearances she'd made while promoting girls' education.

The news that surgeons were able to remove a bullet lodged in Malala's neck was greeted with relief by many. A team of army and civilian surgeons have been treating her at a military hospital in Peshawar where she was airlifted after the Tuesday shooting.

The operation to remove the bullet took hours because there were complications, said the information minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Mian Iftikhar Hussain.

"She is improving. But she is still unconscious," he said. Hussain said there was no decision yet whether the girl needed to be taken abroad for further treatment, but said that doctors felt she was out of danger.

At one time the picturesque Swat Valley — nicknamed the Switzerland of Pakistan — was a popular tourist destination for Pakistanis. Honeymooners vacationed along the river.

Then the Taliban in 2007 began infiltrating the valley just 280 kilometers (175 miles) from the capital, eventually assuming near-total control of the region before being ejected in a massive Pakistani military operation in 2009.

The takeover, as well as the Taliban's brutal treatment of civilians in the region, shocked many Pakistanis, who considered militancy to be a far-away problem in Afghanistan or Pakistan's rugged tribal regions.

But Tuesday's attack demonstrated that the Taliban have not been eradicated from the valley and are trying to make their presence felt even three years after the offensive to oust them.

Malala was nominated last year for the International Children's Peace Prize, which is organized by the Dutch organization KidsRights to highlight the work of children around the world. She also was honored last year with one of Pakistan's highest awards for civilians for her bravery.

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Associated Press writer Sherid Zada in Mingora, Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Adil Jawad in Karachi contributed to this report.

Iran's Khamenei warns of government divisions after rial plunge

DUBAI (Reuters) - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranian officials on Wednesday to stop bickering over mounting economic woes as Tehran grapples with Western-imposed sanctions, voicing concern heightened by the collapse of the rial currency.

His comments touched on divisions between Iranian government agencies and political factions exacerbated by the rial's fall over the past several weeks, fanning an atmosphere of crisis in the world's No. 5 oil-exporting state.

"The country's officials should know and accept their responsibilities and not blame each other," Khamenei said in a televised speech in the northeastern city of Bojnourd. "They should be united and sympathize with each other."

The rial plunged some 35 percent in the free market to a record low against the U.S. dollar over the 10 days to October 2, reflecting a decline in Iran's oil income wrought by tightened sanctions imposed over its disputed nuclear program.

Iranian savers have rushed to convert their rials into hard currency, and riot police briefly clashed with crowds protesting against the rial's slide near Tehran's Grand Bazaar last week.

By selling its remaining petrodollars to importers of basic goods at state-controlled rates, the government could succeed in preventing the currency crisis from crippling the economy.

But the rial's depreciation has hurt the government's credibility and threatens to aggravate inflation, which is already officially estimated at around 25 percent and believed by private economists to be cresting much higher.

The debacle has fed criticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by political enemies eager to pin Iran's economic difficulties on his administration. Parliament speaker Ali Larijani, seen as a possible presidential candidate in elections next year, has been trading barbs with Ahmadinejad.

Senior clerical figures close to Khamenei were fiercely critical of Ahmadinejad's economic management in sermons delivered at last week's Friday prayers, Iranian media reported.

In his speech on Wednesday, Khamenei said: "The illogical sanctions of the West are barbaric," and he acknowledged that inflation and unemployment were pressing problems.

IRAN CAN WITHSTAND SANCTIONS, KHAMENEI SAYS

But he insisted Iran could withstand the sanctions and brushed off last week's street protests, saying they consisted of a few people setting trash cans on fire.

He added that Tehran's merchants, who as a class were instrumental in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, should be praised for distancing themselves from the demonstrations.

Khamenei also denounced Western officials who thought the rial's plunge showed Iranian weakness. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week that the depreciation arose from decisions by the Iranian government, an allusion to Tehran's refusal to curb its nuclear program.

"Are we worse off or you? In the streets of major European countries there are demonstrations day and night ... The problems of the West are much more complicated than ours," Khamenei said, alluding to Europe's debt crisis.

"The West's economy is frozen. You are worse off and you are moving towards collapse and recession. These problems cannot bring the Islamic Republic to its knees."

Legislators announced on Wednesday that they had collected 102 signatures in favor of questioning Ahmadinejad in parliament and presented the motion to the deputy speaker. But there was no word on when this might happen.

Political infighting is not new in Iran's ungainly multipolar power structure and there is no sign that the discontent poses a threat to Khamenei, who is Iran's highest authority but has avoided blame for economic problems.

However, there are signs that government agencies are taking aim at each other over the crisis and this could backfire badly if it restricts Tehran's ability to respond to economic issues.

Armed forces chief Hassan Firouzabadi said this week the central bank was primarily responsible for the currency crunch.

"The problems in the last few days were caused because some in the banking system did not pay attention and the central bank took some issues lightly," Firouzabadi said on Monday, according to the Fars news agency.

Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi was quoted as blaming the rial's descent on poor coordination between government bodies and a government failure to heed predictions made by his ministry as long ago as April 2011, Mehr news agency said.

(Additional reporting by Zahra Hosseinian; Editing by Andrew Torchia and Mark Heinrich)

Global Warming Spurs Extreme Weather, Most in US Believe

A survey released Oct. 9, 2012, finds the majority of Americans think global warming worsened extreme weather events, including the U.S. drought and record-high summer temperatures.

The majority of Americans think global warming is not only affecting weather but is also worsening extreme weather events, including record-high summer temperatures and the Midwest drought, a new survey released today (Oct. 9) finds.

Between Aug. 31 and September, more than 1,000 participants ages 18 and over answered survey questions about their beliefs on global warming and its link to weather events. The results were weighted to give nationally representative numbers.

Overall, there has been an uptick in Americans who see a link between global warming and weather events, as well as those who think weather has gotten worse over time, compared with the March survey, both of which were conducted by theYale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

For instance, 74 percent (a 5 percent increase from March) of Americans said "global warming is affecting weather in the United States." The increase was mostly driven by changing beliefs of residents in the Northeast (82 percent saw a link, up 11 points from March) and the South (75 percent, up 9 points).

A majority of Americans also felt that global warming worsened the six extreme-weather events asked about. For instance, 73 percent either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that global warming had worsened the record-high temperatures this summer; 64 percent said the same of a derecho, or fast-moving band of thunderstorms, which traveled from Indiana to Virginia in June, causing massive power outages and other damage. [Extreme Weather Facts: Quiz Yourself]

Many also agreed that warming had worsened drought in the Midwest and Great Plains (71 percent), the unusually warm winter of 2011-2012 (71 percent), the unusually warm spring of 2012 (70 percent), and record forest fires in the American West (65 percent).

Compared with the March results, more than twice as many Midwesterners said they had experienced an extreme heat wave (83 percent) or drought (81 percent).

Fifty-one percent of Americans said droughts have become more common in their local area over the past few years. (By the end of August 2012, more than 60 percent of the contiguous United States was affected by moderate to exceptional drought.)

And things are perceived to be getting worse: Some 61 percent of Americans indicated U.S. weather has gotten worse in the past several years, up 9 points from March. Looking at local weather, 56 percent of those in the South say it has gotten much or somewhat worse over the past few years, while half of Midwesterners, 43 percent of Westerners and 42 percent of those in the Northeast said the same.

The study, whose results had an average margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent, was funded by the Surdna Foundation, the 11th Hour Project and the Grantham Foundation.

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