By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Tehran

The number of women graduating from Iran's universities is overtaking the number of men, promising a change in the job market and, with it, profound social change.

Twenty postgraduate students are sitting in a plush modern classroom listening to a lecture on environmental management at the Islamic Azad University - a private institution with 1.6 million students across Iran.

The room is darkened so the students can watch the lecturer's slide show comparing energy consumption around the world.

Three quarters of the students in this class are women - the five men in the class are huddled together in a corner.

As Professor Majid Abbaspour explains, this is a far cry from the past:

"When I was doing my bachelor's degree in Iran we had a class of 60 in mechanical engineering with only four women.

"Now the number has changed a lot - I think this may be because the attitudes of families have changed."

Well over half of university students in Iran are now women. In the applied physics department of Azad University 70% of the graduates are women - a statistic which would make many universities in the West proud.

It is a huge social shift since the 1979 Revolution: Iran's Islamic government has managed to convince even traditional rural families that it is safe to send their daughters away from home to study.

Alarm

But in some areas the larger number of women than men is beginning to alarm the authorities.

"As a matter of fact it's starting to get worrying - in some fields maybe they will put some limitations?" says Professor Abbaspour, referring to suggestions that there should be positive discrimination for men in certain key subjects.

We women want to show we are here and we have a lot to say - for years we have lived under the heavy shadow of men - our fathers and brothers and now we want to come out of that
Massoumeh Umidvar
Student and working mother
He explains: "In the oil and gas industries at the present time there is no discrimination but... for example when they want to work on the oil and gas platforms in the Persian Gulf area it might be very hard for women to do so."

Part of the reason for more women in university education seems to be that many young men are more interested in making money.

"We women want to show we are here and we have a lot to say," says Massoumeh Pahshahie Umidvar.

"For years we have lived under the heavy shadow of men, our fathers and brothers, and now we want to come out of that."

Massoumeh holds down a job in a factory, has a child and is doing a postgraduate degree. Her life is completely different from that of her mother who stayed at home, cooking and looking after children.

'Historic opportunity'

"Before the revolution everybody supposed that if you wanted to be a rich person with a good standard of living you needed to be educated," explains journalist and social commentator Sayed Laylaz.

I will choose a person as a husband who lets me work because I love my job...
Sudabeh Shahkhudahee
Nurse
"But after the revolution because of a lot of changes - especially because of the Iran-Iraq war - this mentality changed.

"At the moment boys don't think that if they want to be a successful person they should be educated and because of this they leave free more places for girls to go to university."

Mr Laylaz calls it a historic opportunity for women that they have eagerly seized. He hopes this new generation of educated Iranian women will force social change in the decades ahead.

It will not be long, he argues, before women are in charge of recruitment in offices. Already he sees signs that Iran's politicians recognise the importance of women's votes in elections.

Massoumeh tells her husband that it will not be long before Iranian men will be forced to sit at home while their wives run the country.

Already it has become a problem for women with degrees to find husbands with the same level of education.

Marriage or a career

Another social change is that young women who do have careers are now beginning to think twice about getting married. Especially as under Iranian law a woman needs her husband's permission to go to work.

Sudabeh Shahkhudahee has just finished a night shift as a nurse and is relaxing in front of her cousin's satellite TV and reading her horoscope.

After studying at university and finding the right job Sudabeh is nervous about her future - she could lose it all if she marries the wrong man.

"I will choose a person as a husband who lets me work because I love my job," she says.

"I will not give up my job after I get married."

This is a sentiment that is increasingly being heard in a society where a single woman even has trouble hiring an apartment to live alone.

Sudabeh knows it is going to be hard to find a man who will not have a problem with her doing night shifts and being away from home for long periods, especially when she has children.

Working mothers are a relatively new phenomenon in Iran but attitudes are changing among the younger generation of working women, many of whom will no longer accept a husband who does not share the workload at home.

"Our men are coming out of this macho shell and becoming more co-operative," says a young married student.

Many believe Iranian women who have worked hard to overtake Iranian men will be the ones to bring about social and political change.

"Maybe in the near future we can get our rights - at least I hope," says another student.

Huge cost of Iranian brain drain
By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Tehran

"Today we are going to talk about jobs," says the English language teacher to his class in Tehran.
And it's better jobs they're all after.

They're preparing for what's known as the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam - a requirement for emigration to many countries like Canada and Australia.

Everyone in the class wants to go abroad.

"The main point for going out of Iran is we have no job security here and there is economic tension," says 32-year-old travel agent, Nazaneen.

The number of educated young Iranians trying to leave the country appears to have increased in the last year since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office judging by the numbers sitting the IELTS exam.

The figures have increased two-and-a-half times this year over the same period last year, according to the Australian administrators of the test.

Student dreams

A year ago, the International Monetary Fund said Iran had the highest rate of brain drain of 90 countries it measured.

"We work from morning till night and still we cannot live off the money we make but over there we can have a better life with less hours of work," said Shabanzade, a hairdresser in Tehran who wants to emigrate.

"There are economic problems and no job security and no freedom," says another student who hopes to go to Australia.
The teacher, who lived in England for many years, says most of his students dream of a better lifestyle abroad.

"They have friends and relatives abroad and they've heard lots about it but living abroad is not as easy as they think it's going to be," warns Mohammad Azadi.

Registering for the exam these students are preparing for is a nightmare in Tehran - let alone passing it.

Hundreds of students start queuing to put their names down more than 12 hours before the kiosk opens.

Best minds

"I came here at 2300 and it was so cold," says Azadeh, who has been standing on the pavement outside the ministry of education building all night.

She wants to study abroad and then find a job. She has no plans to return to Iran.

According to the IMF more than a 150,000 of the best young minds in Iran are leaving every year.

"They want to go abroad to find a decent job, well paid - that's the main purpose... A minority wants freedom and liberty, but the main point is jobs," explains Siavosh who's hoping to move to Australia.

It will be months before these students can do their language test. Then they will join the long queues outside foreign embassies in Tehran.

And the cost to Iran of not stemming this brain drain - one government estimate put it at nearly $40bn a year.

It is a terrible indictment of Iran's economic planning that it is educating millions of its youth, but cannot offer them a future worth staying for.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6240287.stm

Published: 2007/01/08 12:36:15 GMT

© BBC MMVII

The Biden Opportunity: Fulbright or Vandenberg. Partisan or Citizen. Past or Future.

by Newt Gingrich
Posted Jan 08, 2007

Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) stands at one of the major crossroads of our time.

As the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Biden has the power to set the tone for the next two years. He must decide: He can follow the path of Sen. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) who, as chairman of Foreign Relations in the 1960s, focused on the past, opposed the Vietnam War and helped set the stage for an American defeat.

Or he can look to the future and develop a bipartisan consensus about what threatens America and what needs to be done about it.

Sen. Biden can be a very partisan chairman leading a very partisan series of hearings narrowly focused on Iraq and trying to blame President Bush for the world's problems.

Or he can be a leader who focuses on what threatens America and what we need to do to secure safety in an increasingly dangerous world.

Seeking Blame or Seeking Solutions?

If Chairman Biden decides to do a Fulbright-like partisan series of narrowly tailored hearings, he will clearly be focused on the past, seeking to assign blame, and pursuing a series of actions which would force the Bush Administration to be on the defensive. This will maximize partisan hostility and minimize the development of effective, creative solutions to our national security challenges.

Or he could choose an alternative path.

In 1946, Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg was the new Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Republicans had been out of power for 16 years. They thought they could win the Presidency in two years. There was every temptation to be bitterly partisan. On domestic politics they were. Republicans disliked Democrat President Harry Truman and tended to speak of him with contempt.

However, Vandenberg had seen the failure of the peace process after World War I. He had seen the power of partisan politics to cripple American standing in the world.

He had also seen thousands of young Americans sacrifice their lives in World War II.

Biden Has the Same Opportunity Vandenberg Had in 1946

Sen. Vandenberg understood that his duty was to work with President Truman to assess the threats to America and to develop a bipartisan strategy which Americans could support.

The result was the policy of containment, which for 44 years (1947 to 1991) protected freedom against the Soviet Union until that empire collapsed and disappeared.

Fewer Americans have been more successful or served their country better than the Vandenberg-Truman-Marshall-Eisenhower bipartisanship team.

Sen. Biden has the same opportunity today that Sen. Vandenberg had in 1946.

A Bipartisan Consensus on Our Enemies and How to Defeat Them

Imagine that Sen. Biden broadens the scope of his hearings to include the scale of threats facing America.

Imagine that he focuses on asking experts what needs to be done for America to successfully address these threats.

Imagine that he consciously seeks to create a bipartisan consensus on American solutions for American national security.

The entire tone of the process and the results of the process would move us forward in a decisive way. It would lay the foundation for the next President from either party to be inheriting a bipartisan consensus on how to defend America and defeat her enemies.

Sen. Biden has a very great opportunity indeed. But he must choose to take it.

Taking an American Approach to National Security Is the Right Thing to Do

There is a profound moral reason for Chairman Biden to approach these hearings from a nonpartisan standpoint: National security is about the life and death of Americans and potentially the survival of America itself.

The threats are too real, our enemies too dangerous, and the solutions too hard for national security to be dealt with in a narrowly partisan way. If our leaders in Washington stay fixated on partisan in-fighting, Republicans may win or Democrats may win -- but either way, America will lose.

1. The Threats Are Too Real.

The evidence is overwhelming that North Korea and Iran are trying to get nuclear weapons. The terrorist organizations speak openly on their web sites about their efforts to get biological and nuclear weapons.

We are entering an era where we could literally lose an American city or cities in one morning.

We are entering a time when millions of American lives could be endangered overnight.

This is a time for Americans to have an honest dialogue about the forces and technologies that threaten us, the men who openly say they want to kill us, and what it will take for us to work together on a set of strategies that will make the American people safe.

This challenge is so much more important than the normal backbiting, nit picking, petty politics that routinely dominate Washington that it will take a real act of leadership to rise to the challenge.

2. Our Enemies Are Too Dangerous.

The painful, difficult reality of the five and a half years since the 9/11 attacks is that our enemies are more determined, more ruthless, more resilient and more resourceful than we had expected.

When Kim Jong Il and his North Korean dictatorship ignores the entire world, including his major supplier, China, and fires seven missiles on our Fourth of July and then sets off a nuclear weapon, we are up against people who will not be bluffed.

When the Venezuelan dictator has the nerve to viciously attack the American President in a United Nations speech on American soil and then openly give away subsidized heating oil in America to build ties inside the country he is denouncing, we are up against a cleverness we had not anticipated.

When the Iranians blatantly admit they have been lying to the International Atomic Energy Agency for 18 years and then go on offense against the powers that seek to limit their nuclear program, they are showing a brazen disregard of the international community that is chilling.

In Iraq, our enemies have proven more numerous, more complex, more resourceful and more resilient than we expected.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban is making a comeback from its sanctuaries in Northwest Pakistan. At the same time, one-third of the country's economy is based on illegal drugs.

None of these problems is on the verge of being solved and none of them is getting easier or less dangerous.

3. The Solutions Are Too Hard for Business as Usual.

Protecting America and helping our allies succeed is going to require a generation of invention, creativity, ingenuity and investment.

There is no Republican monopoly on solving these problems.

There is no Democratic monopoly on solving these problems.

This is not just a matter of policy.

Most of the basic instruments of American national security, foreign policy and homeland security simply no longer work. Katrina was the most vivid and painful example of this collapse of effective implementation. But Democrats have been so busy attacking President George W. Bush that they have avoided thinking about how bad the bureaucratic collapse has become. And Republicans have been so busy defending their administration that they have not allowed themselves to confront just how broken the system is.

Every Bureaucracy Will Fight Tooth and Nail to Protect Itself From Change

Focusing on personality and policy are the easy parts. We need a serious effort to understand what does not work in simple day-to-day effectiveness and what needs to be done to correct it. And don't kid yourself. This will turn out to be one of the hardest and most bitterly fought parts of rethinking our national security and homeland security situation. But it needn't be partisan.

Every great bureaucracy will fight tooth and nail to protect itself from change. And while individual civil servants are patriots, the historic reality is that without leadership, institutions will energetically resist change at the expense of defeating our enemies. Any partisan effort to transform the entrenched bureaucracies will inevitably fail because the bureaucratic defenders of the status quo and their allied interest groups will act in self-preservation to oppose any real change.

A Bipartisan Model for Success

Let me suggest a possible model for success. In 1981, I helped found the bipartisan military reform caucus. And in 1986, I helped pass the bipartisan Goldwater-Nichols reform bill that created the concept of joint-war fighting, which people point to now as a major improvement in the system.

It could never have been passed as a partisan act by either the Democrats or the Republicans. It had to grow out of a genuine bipartisan spirit of concern about fixing the armed services.

Pursuing a path for partisan political gain today will be paid for in lives lost in a preventable calamity tomorrow.

Let us hope that today, faced with much bigger problems with profoundly greater threats to our survival, Sen. Biden chooses to launch bipartisan hearings with a future-oriented, solutions-oriented American approach to securing America's future.

Your friend,

Newt Gingrich

January 8, 2007
Calif. Governor Calls for Universal Health Coverage

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:45 p.m. ET

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday proposed to extend health coverage to nearly all of California's 6.5 million uninsured people, promising to spread the cost among businesses, individuals, hospitals, doctors, insurers and government.

The plan contains elements that are likely to provoke opposition from a wide range of powerful interests, including doctors, hospitals and insurers, as well as employers and unions. But it also contains incentives for each of them.

All children, regardless of their immigration status, would be covered through an expansion of the state and federal Healthy Families program.

''I don't think it is a question or a debate if they ought to be covered. ... The federal courts have made that decision -- that no one can be turned away,'' Schwarzenegger said. ''The question really isn't to treat them or not to treat them. The question really is how can you treat them in the most cost-effective way.''

Under Schwarzenegger's plan, all Californians would be required to have insurance, although the poorest would be subsidized. Businesses with 10 or more employees would have to offer insurance to their workers or pay 4 percent of their payroll into a state fund. Smaller businesses would be exempt.

Also, insurers would no longer be allowed to deny coverage to people because of their medical problems.

Business groups and Republican legislators are likely to object to the extra costs imposed on businesses.

The state would subsidize the estimated 1.2 million poor people who do not currently qualify for state health coverage. They would be able to buy insurance through a state-run pool and would have to make a small contribution toward their premiums.

Schwarzenegger is betting that his plan will save $10 billion a year by cutting health care costs. He says the savings would offset the new fees he is asking doctors and hospitals to pay -- 4 percent of revenue for hospitals and 2 percent for doctors.

The state also would increase what it pays doctors and hospitals through Medi-Cal, the state insurance plan for the poor.

The governor was supposed to give his address in person to a panel of health care officials. Instead, he spoke via video link since he is still recuperating from broken leg suffered in a skiing accident.

'Why I Serve' Speakers Anxious to Share Good News About Iraq, Afghanistan
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2007 – Many of the troops fanning out across the country beginning this week to share their deployment experiences with civilian groups say they hope to share some of the "good news" stories that often don't make it into the evening news.

The eight troops are participating in the Defense Department's "Why I Serve" program, which gives men and women in uniform the opportunity to speak to groups ranging from the Boy Scouts to local Rotary Clubs to schools and retirement community organizations.

The concept originated with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who wanted a way to help reconnect troops to the American people, Marine Maj. Matt Morgan, the program's director, explained.

"So we took a number of ideas, and one of them was taking troops just returned from overseas and sending them out to the American people so they could talk to community organizations and groups and interface directly without the interference of filters," Morgan said.

Army Staff Sgt. Jerome MacDonald, a combat medic who returned from Iraq in February 2006, said he and his fellow Why I Serve participants have "an incredible amount of different stories" to share about their time on the ground in the Middle East.

He said he's excited about the opportunity to spend the next 90 days sharing those personal stories with people who may never have heard firsthand what it's like to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan.

"I think it's important to tell people what's going on," he said. "They can turn on CNN, but there's someone on CNN telling them what they saw over there. This will be the soldier telling you, 'This is what I saw; this is what I did.'"

Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Lyndon Romeo said he hopes his firsthand accounts will give the American public new insights. "I can describe to them and get them to see what I saw," he said. "They will see a personal side they wouldn't otherwise see from a person who has been in the field and can relate to them on a one-on-one basis."

For Air Force Staff Sgt. Jeramiah Poff, the Why I Serve program represents an opportunity to share personal stories about his interaction with the Iraqi people and day-to-day life while deployed. "I'm going to share with them my experiences, everything from the culture to the daily routine to living conditions, what it's like, even how I feel to be in uniform, and how proud I am of what I do," he said.

Air Force Master Sgt. Ruben Vazquez, a medical technician who will begin his Why I Serve tour this week speaking to a Colorado Boy Scout group, said he looks forward to sharing some of the good things happening in Iraq that never get covered in the news.

"You hear about body counts and explosions and about the negative things happening over there, but you don't hear a lot about the positive things," he said. "And I did see a lot of positive things when I was over there: a lot of construction, a lot of training, a lot of education, a lot of gifts coming from the states.

"It's not something you see a lot in the media, the positive impact we are making," he said.

Marine Cpl. Michael Good Jr. said he will tell the groups he addresses how much most Iraqis appreciate what U.S. troops are doing in their country. "I was there sweeping roads for bombs, and they were very appreciative of what we do, because a 3-year-old could be walking down the road, then all of a sudden, 'Boom!'" he said. "The insurgents don't care who it is, a U.S. troop or an Iraqi civilian. They don't care who they are going to kill.

"I was surprised at how appreciative some of the Iraqi people are that we are there," he said.

Marine Corps 1st Lt. Richard Posselt, another program participant, said he is happy to get the chance to share his experiences training both Afghan and Iraqi security forces. "I want to get the message out that we are succeeding over there and making positive strides," he said. "I'm excited about trying to talk to as many people as possible in the next three months and get the word out there."

Posselt said he plans to tell people that he and his fellow troops believe in their mission. "We are there for the greater good of both Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "We are out here trying to make a difference, and we believe in what we are doing."

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