World

Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai has called on Nigeria to focus on improving its education system, as she visited the country and met some of the Chibok schoolgirls whose cause she championed.

Yousafzai, 20, a Pakistani education activist who came to prominence when a Taliban militant shot her in the head in 2012, was named a UN Messenger of Peace in April to promote girls’ education around the world.

After a meeting with Nigeria’s acting president in Abuja, Yousafzai said the government should declare a “state of emergency on education in Nigeria,” where nearly half of primary-aged children are not enrolled in school.

According to UN figures, Nigeria has some 10.5 million children out of school -- the most in the world -- and 60 percent of them are girls.

Yousafzai has also taken part in global campaigns to maintain awareness of more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram Islamist militants from their school in Nigeria’s remote town of Chibok in 2014.

Some 100 of the schoolgirls still remain in captivity, while others were freed or escaped. Yousafzai met some of the freed girls in Abuja, Nigeria's capital.

Malala won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize along with Kailash Satyarthi of India.

Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters

The first-ever treaty to ban nuclear weapons has been approved by 122 countries despite a boycott by all nuclear-armed states.

The vote was announced on July 7 by Elayne Whyte Gomez, president of the United Nations conference that negotiated the treaty, to loud applause.

"We have managed to sow the first seeds of a world free of nuclear weapons," she said. "The world has been waiting for this legal norm for 70 years," since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she said.

None of the nine countries that possess nuclear weapons -- the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel -- supported the treaty.

In a joint statement, UN ambassadors from the United States, Britain, and France said the treaty "clearly disregards the realities of the international security environment."

It offers no solution to "the grave threat posed by North Korea's nuclear program, nor does it address other security challenges that make nuclear deterrence necessary," they said.

A ban that doesn't address these concerns "cannot result in the elimination of a single nuclear weapon and will not enhance any country's security," they said.

Western nuclear powers instead want to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Based on reporting by AP and AFP