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 […]
ALBANY – The Court of Appeals yesterday upheld the constitutionality of a women’s health act that pressures some religious-affiliated employers to either offer their employees a prescription plan that includes contraceptive coverage or deny their workers any drug coverage at all. In Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany v. Serio, 110, the Court rejected the claims of 10 faith-based organizations and refused to exempt them from a key provision in the Women’s Health and Wellness Act. The ruling makes it difficult, but not impossible, for an individual or group to avoid on religious grounds a neutral law of general application. Yesterday’s Court of Appeals decisions begin on page 22 of the print edition of today’s Law Journal. But the judges also explicitly refused to narrow the Free Exercise Clause in the state Constitution to conform with the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause in Employment Division v. Smith, 494 US 872 (1990). They insisted that the rule they adopted, while deferential to the Legislature and weighted toward ‘efficient government,’ is ‘more protective of religious exercise’ than the one embraced in Smith. That, experts said, remains to be seen. At issue in this appeal […]
WASHINGTON — The number of oxygen-starved ‘dead zones” in the world’s seas and oceans has risen more than a third in the past two years because of fertilizer, sewage, animal waste and fossil-fuel burning, United Nations experts said Thursday. Their number has jumped to about 200, according to new estimates released by U.N. marine experts meeting in Beijing. In 2004, U.N. experts put the estimate at 149 globally. The damage is caused by explosive blooms of tiny plants known as phytoplankton, which die and sink to the bottom, and then are eaten by bacteria which use up the oxygen in the water. Those blooms are triggered by too many nutrients ─ particularly phosphorous and nitrogen. The U.N. report estimates there will be a 14 percent rise in the amount of nitrogen that rivers are pumping into seas and oceans globally over a period from when the levels were measured in the mid-1990s to 2030. Oxygen starvation robs the seas and oceans of many fish, oysters, sea grass beds and other marine life ─ and the number of such dead zones has grown every decade since the 1970s. Not all of them persist year-round, as they […]
WASHINGTON — The world _ especially the Western United States, the Mediterranean region and Brazil _ will likely suffer more extended droughts, heavy rainfalls and longer heat waves over the next century because of global warming, a new study forecasts. But the prediction of a future of nasty extreme weather also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season. In a preview of a major international multiyear report on climate change that comes out next year, a study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research details what nine of the world’s top computer models predict for the lurching of climate at its most extreme. ‘It’s going to be a wild ride, especially for specific regions,’ said study lead author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the federally funded academic research center. Tebaldi pointed to the Western U.S., Mediterranean nations and Brazil as ‘hot spots’ that will get extremes at their worst, according to the computer models. And some places, such as the Pacific Northwest, are predicted to get a strange double whammy of longer dry spells punctuated by heavier rainfall. As the world warms, there will be more rain likely in the tropical Pacific […]
Areas that researchers have declared the most polluted in the world are typically little known even in their own countries. Yet they in total afflict more than 10 million people, experts reported today. The kinds of pollution in these areas not only lead to cancers, birth defects, mental retardation and life expectancies approaching medieval levels, but are also often found all around the globe. ‘They cause an enormous amount of misery and harm, especially to children,’ Richard Fuller, founder and director of the Blacksmith Institute, the New York-based environmental group who released a report on these areas today, told LiveScience. The Top 10 most polluted places for 2006, in alphabetical order by country: Linfen, China, where residents say they literally choke on coal dust in the evenings, exemplifies many Chinese cities; Haina, Dominican Republic, has severe lead contamination because of lead battery recycling, a problem common throughout poorer countries [image]; Ranipet, India, where leather tanning wastes contaminate groundwater with hexavalent chromium, made famous by Erin Brockovich, resulting in water that apparently stings like an insect bite [image]; Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan, home to nearly 2 million cubic meters of radioactive mining waste that threatens the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
