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Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen who was attacked by Taliban militants for promoting education for girls, will share the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian campaigner against exploitation of children.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee says on Nobelprize.org:

"Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi's tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain. He has also contributed to the development of important international conventions on children's rights.

"Despite her youth, Malala Yousafzai has already fought for several years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations. This she has done under the most dangerous circumstances. Through her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls' rights to education."

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Kailash Satyarthi (in white) greets U.N. officials at a meeting in Geneva in 1998. Donald Stampfli/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Donald Stampfli/AP

Kailash Satyarthi (in white) greets U.N. officials at a meeting in Geneva in 1998.

Donald Stampfli/AP

Yousafzai, 17, defied the Taliban in her town of Mingora in Swat Valley, near the volatile western frontier dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan. In October 2012, Taliban militiamen boarded a school bus she was on, singled her out and shot her in the left side of the head. Two other girls were also wounded in the attack.

Left in critical condition, Yousafzai received an outpouring of international support and was moved to the U.K. for treatment.

"Malala battled for her life, and came back to become an international ambassador for the rights of girls to be educated," NPR's Julie McCarthy says.

In July 2013, Yousafzai addressed the United Nations, telling delegates that the Taliban "thought that bullets would silence us, but they failed.

"The terrorists thought that they would change my aims and stop my ambitions," she said defiantly, "but nothing changed in my life, except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born."

She is a previous recipient of the Sakharov Prize and was first nominated for the Peace Prize last year. She now lives in Birmingham, England, but the Taliban have threatened to target her again.

Yousafzai is the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.

Speaking in Birmingham hours after the award was announced, Yousafzai said she was in chemistry class when her teacher informed her she'd won.

"I decided not to leave school," the education campaigner said. "I treated it like a normal day."

She called the Peace Prize a "precious award" and "a great honor" and said her co-recipient, Satyarthi, "totally deserved" the prize.

"This is not the end. This is really the beginning. I want to see every child going to school," she said.

Satyarthi, 60, is a longtime activist against child labor and for better education of children in South Asia. In his 20s, he gave up a career as an electrical engineer and "dedicated his life to helping the millions of children in India who are forced into slavery by powerful and corrupt business- and landowners," PBS writes.

"His original idea was daring and dangerous. He decided to mount raids on factories — factories frequently manned by armed guards — where children and often entire families were held captive as bonded workers.

"After successfully freeing and rehabilitating thousands of children, he went on to build up a global movement against child labor. Today Kailash heads up the Global March Against Child Labor, a conglomeration of 2000 social-purpose organizations and trade unions in 140 countries."

The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights calls Satyarthi "India's lodestar for the abolition of child labor."

"Since 1980, he has led the rescue of over 75,000 bonded and child slaves in India and developed a successful model for their education and rehabilitation. Kailash has emancipated thousands of children from bonded labor, a form of slavery where a desperate family typically borrows needed funds from a lender (sums as little as $35) and is forced to hand over a child as surety until the funds can be repaid," the RFK Center says.

Speaking to NPR in 2011, Satyarthi decried the rise of female feticide — or so-called selective abortions — in India, explaining: "The parents feel that the boy is a help for the future, where the girl is a liability.

"If we spend money on her, then we have to spend money on her marriage, dowry probably, and then if something goes wrong, then we are always sufferers. So better that that girl is not born," he said, explaining the reasoning of some parents in India.

Pakistan

Nobel Peace Prize

India

Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictionary once dismissed porridge as "a food usually reserved for horses in England, in Scotland supports the people."

That was in the 1700s. These days, porridge is seen as more cool than gruel. Today is World Porridge Day — and to celebrate, London hosted its own porridge-making competition.

"Most people think of porridge as a winter dish, and a richer, heavier dish. But I do think it's coming back in vogue. In the last 10 years, it's risen in profile," says Toral Shah, a competitor at Friday morning's event.

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Judges taste test an entry in Friday's London Porridge Championships. Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship hide caption

itoggle caption Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Judges taste test an entry in Friday's London Porridge Championships.

Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Porridge is traditionally Scottish, with its heritage in the oaty diets of crofters, or tenant farmers, of the remote Highlands. I'm a Scotsman, and porridge formed an integral part of my childhood. Winter would mean one thing for certain: a steaming hot bowl of the stuff every morning, before trudging through the snow to school.

Porridge is such a subjective thing. Mine was made with milk, occasionally dried fruit, and either brown sugar or golden syrup drizzled in the shape of a smiley face. Just as long as you remember to stir clockwise — stirring counter-clockwise risks summoning the devil, according to Scottish superstition.

Nick Barnard is a porridge traditionalist, and a judge in Friday's London Porridge Championships. "I have a bowl of oatmeal, flavored with salt and cooked just right — piping hot," Barnard says, explaining his technique. "I dip my spoon into the porridge, then into cold, raw Guernsey cream. ... And there I am, absolutely loving this wonderful simplicity."

Barnard runs London-based Rude Health foods, which sponsored Friday's competition. He was crowned last year's champion in the "speciality" category — he made a fruity date dish — at the World Porridge Making Championships, held annually in Carrbridge in the Highlands of Scotland.

The 21st world championship was held last weekend. Entrants competed in two categories: traditional and speciality. The winner in the former category takes home the "Golden Spurtle," a Scottish kitchen tool for stirring porridge, thought to have originated six centuries ago. Made of wood, it looks like a tiny baseball bat. This year's traditional winner, Dr. Izhar Khan, a kidney specialist from Aberdeen, Scotland, told NPR he credited his victory to the spurtle he used, made by one of his patients.

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Personal fitness trainer Adam Stansbury won Friday's London competition with this chocolate and honey porridge. Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship hide caption

itoggle caption Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Personal fitness trainer Adam Stansbury won Friday's London competition with this chocolate and honey porridge.

Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

As for the prize for the speciality dish, it was awarded jointly to Chris Young and Christine Conte. Chris had turned savoury, putting together a wild mushroom porridge risotto, while Christina — a Scottish-Italian food blogger based in Los Angeles — made a sticky toffee porridge.

The winner of today's London event — personal fitness trainer Adam Stansbury — wowed the judges with his chocolate and honey porridge.

Fellow competitor Toral Shah is another health-food fanatic; she runs London's Urban Kitchen. The porridge competition, she says, "is a fun thing to do, it's slightly competitive, and I really want to show people that you can make things taste brilliant, but they can be really healthy, too."

Indeed, porridge's widely acclaimed nutritional benefits — slow-releasing carbohydrates, energy-rich and easy to digest — are credited in part for its resurgent popularity in recent years.

Some even credit porridge with changing the course of Scottish history. In his book The Scottish: A Genetic Journey, author Alistair Moffat argues that soon after the Scots began farming cereals thousands of years ago, they learned how to turn that harvest into porridge — a discovery that fueled the nation's population growth. His argument? Feeding children porridge — a meal soft enough not to tax fragile baby teeth — meant that women could stop breastfeeding sooner, freeing them up to have more children.

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A simple take on Scotland's beloved dish. Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship hide caption

itoggle caption Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

A simple take on Scotland's beloved dish.

Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Modern Britons clearly haven't forgotten their roots. According to research firm Mintel, almost half of 16- to 24-year-olds in the U.K. surveyed last year said they start the day with porridge. And fast-casual food chain Pret A Manger's sales of hot cereals doubled in the U.K. in 2013.

But the porridge love has spread well beyond the U.K. Kahn's competitors in last week's championships included the owner of a porridge bar in Copenhagen, as well as Sweden's Nordic porridge-making champion.

So what does Barnard look for in a great serving of porridge? The first word he uses is "moreish" — how nourishingly delicious is it? He wants imagination, and something that's pleasing. The quality of the ingredients is also important for him. "Could I eat a whole bowl of it, and will it sustain me?"

For Toral, it's the experimental possibilities that make porridge so exciting. Take her beetroot and apple version, with hints of ginger, cinnamon, vanilla yogurt and spiced granola. "And it's apple season," she adds. "Why would you not go seasonal?"

So, tell us, how do you eat yours?

Scottish food

porridge

I watched the season premiere of Law & Order SVU, and I was excited to see that it covered a topic I've reported on for the last year — sex trafficking of women in Mexico — and that a very rich cast of Latino actors were featured on the show. But man, that good feeling stopped almost as soon as I heard them speak.

The Spanish and Spanglish used in the show was embarrassing. When it comes to Latinos on the screen, Hollywood keeps missing the mark on the way we speak.

One of the SVU story lines focused on a young Mexican prostitute who has been trafficked to the U.S. a year or two ago. Somehow, she speaks fantastic English, just with an accent, to the NYPD detective during a long interrogation. After that, she spontaneously starts talking in very dramatic Spanish to a non-Latina detective she just met.

As someone who regularly speaks English, Spanish and Spanglish (that mix of English and Spanish), this made no sense. For American Latinos, there are certain unspoken rules about what language you speak, and to whom. I know if I ever speak to my parents (native Argentines) in Spanglish, I will get immediately corrected with the word I'm looking for — but can't remember — in Spanish. And if I ever speak to my mom in English — well, I don't do that (she pretends she can't hear me over the phone.)

I'm not alone. Other NPR listeners have chimed in on how they navigated the family politics of language. Twitter user Yvonne Hennessy wrote: "Abuelitos [grandparents] = Spanish. Nuclear family & primos [cousins]= Spanglish or English.

Gisela Castanon wrote in to say, "My parents were from Mexico & both were bilingual in Spanish and English... the rule was cuando te hable en espaol me contestas en espaol, y cuando te hable en ingls,e contestas en ingls. When I talk to you in Spanish, you reply in Spanish, and when I talk to you in English, you reply in English."

Listener Marly Perez wrote, "I speak Spanglish with my sister, but not with my relatives. It's Spanish only. They don't get annoyed if I do — they just call me out on it."

If you're a Spanglish speaker, it's not just your family calling you out. Anti-immigration activists in the U.S. are also fervent critics. They point to Spanglish as a symbol of everything that's wrong with Latino immigration. Look! They aren't assimilating! Hispanic invasion! Destruction of the English language! Gah! Interestingly, that distaste is shared by plenty of Latin Americans, who wrinkle their noses at the mere mention of "Spanglish."

As a South American myself, I've heard plenty of snide inside jokes about "those" Latinos in the U.S. who don't fully master the Spanish. In certain circles, Spanglish is seen as a "contamination" of the Spanish language. A few years back, the Spanish Royal Academy created a small controversy when it inducted the word "Spanglish" into its dictionary, but defined it as "deformed elements of vocabulary and grammar from both Spanish and English." Ouch.

But for some Latin cultures, losing Spanglish would also mean losing their identity. Listener Paola Cap-Garca wrote, "it's definitely a part of everyday living in Puerto Rico, not just the US Latino experience....I think we're taught to think Spanglish is a failure, that it's 'imperialist' or that it's 'uneducated' or 'unattractive,' but I've come to accept/appreciate it...I like the hodgepodge."

I like the hodgepodge too, but only when it's done right. Too many U.S. movies and television shows get it wrong, even when they pride themselves in being authentic. Many people singled out the show Breaking Bad, and the character Gustavo "Gus" Fring, for falling flat on language. Tamara Vallejos writes, "Gus' Spanish and accent were so painful to listen to, and it made me super angry that such a pivotal and fantastic character would have such a giant, noticeable, nails-on-a-chalkboard flaw."

I will say there are examples of Hollywood doing it right. The film Chef is a great example. The film stars Sofia Vergara, but with a script that doesn't force her to overdo her accent or screech her way through the boisterous Latina stereotype (which is how many of us see her in her Modern Family). In the film, she isn't playing a Latina stereotype. She's playing a concerned mom who happens to be Latina. The Spanish and Spanglish happens when it's supposed to, and it just flows very naturally.

This is the way it's supposed to be, and it's the way it could be. There are over 50 million Latinos in America, and surely scriptwriters can find one of us to check the script with.

Until then, I have this thought: Here's a word I love in the Spanish language: ningunear. It's a verb that comes from the noun ningun, or "none." It literally means to turn someone into nothing, to condescend. Dear Hollywood: stop with the ninguneo.

spanglish

Breaking Bad

Hollywood

Latinos

In 1997, Cylvia Hayes, now Oregon's first lady, received about $5,000 to marry an Ethiopian man who wanted a green card. At a tearful news conference in Portland, Ore., Hayes said Thursday that she had made a "serious mistake" in what was a "difficult and unstable period" in her life.

"I want to be clear today — I was associating with the wrong people," she said in a statement read at the news conference. "I was struggling to put myself through college and was offered money in exchange for marrying a young person who had a chance to get a college degree himself if he were able to remain in the United States."

The hastily called news conference followed a story in the Willamette Weekly. The newspaper reported:

"In 1997, King County, Wash., marriage records show, Hayes married a teenage Ethiopian immigrant 11 years younger than she. It's not clear why Hayes entered into the marriage and why she has kept it secret. However, public records raise questions about whether the marriage was legitimate or whether it was a way to help the young man with his immigration status."

News stories have identified the man as Abraham B. Abraham. He was 18 at the time. Hayes was 29. The story noted that they filed for divorce in 2001. Hayes said that she and Abraham met only a handful of times and never lived together. She said they have not had any contact since the divorce was finalized.

Hayes called the marriage "wrong then and it is wrong now," adding, "I am here today to accept the consequences, some of which will be life changing."

Hayes and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat, aren't married, but have been together for 10 years. The governor's office refers to Hayes as first lady.

In her statement Thursday, Hayes said she did not tell Kitzhaber about the marriage until the story broke.

"This is the most painful part for me. John Kitzhaber deserved to know the history of the person he was forming a relationship with. The fact that I did not disclose this to him meant that he has learned about this in the most public and unpleasant way," she said. "This is my greatest sorrow in this difficult situation."

So-called green card marriages are illegal under federal law. But the Oregonian quotes local immigration official Philip Hornik as saying an investigation is more likely when there are "fresh tracks." Here's more:

"The statute of limitation for criminal penalties is five years from the marriage date, meaning Hayes' deadline passed in 2002. There's no limitation on civil penalties, however. Hayes is likely safe from legal repercussions, yet immigration officials have the power to revoke a given status from immigrants who benefit from such deals."

That could affect Abraham, who news reports say later earned a degree in math from Greensboro College in North Carolina and now lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Political pundits interviewed by the Oregonian said they doubted the story would hurt Kitzhaber, who is seeking a fourth term against state Rep. Dennis Richardson, a Republican.

Gov. John Kitzhaber

Cylvia Hayes

Oregon