Tehran Municipality has agreed to provide insurance coverage for women financially supporting their families, an advisor to Tehran mayor said.
In an interview with Fars news agency, Zahra Moshir stated that the scheme would be implemented in two stages since it needs substantial funding.
“In the first stage, Tehrani women heading their households will be brought under insurance coverage, while their dependents will be covered in the next stage.“
Putting the number of the capital female-led households covered by the TM at 4,530, the official noted that some of these women are insured by Imam Khomeini Relief Committee; while some others have insured themselves independently. “But the majority have no insurance coverage.“
Moshir said the municipality cannot determine when the scheme would be started. “But we are negotiating with Social Security Organization of Iran for some discounts on insurance premiums,“ she added.
The official added that Tehran Municipality would inquire well-informed local sources in every neighborhood to identify women-headed households.
She declined to comment on the budget the municipality has set aside for the scheme.

Anousheh Ansari

Anousheh Ansari, a US entrepreneur of Iranian origin, will be the world’ first female spaceflyer.
Russia’s Federal Space Agency announced that Daisuke Enomoto, the Japanese businessman who was undergoing flight training to go on a 10-day roundtrip to the orbital laboratory, was barred from the flight to the International Space Station (ISS) due to medical problems.
As per a statement released by the agency on Aug. 22, Ansari will fly onboard Soyuz TMA-9 to ISS on Sept. 14 instead of Enomoto.
Ansari, a 39-year-old chairwoman and co-founder of Prodea Systems, Inc., a digital home technology company, has received space training in Russia as a backup spaceflyer for Japanese businessman.
Ansari like other space tourists has forked out $20 million for the trip and a 10-day stay in orbit.
She will blast off aboard Russian rocket along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria.
The first female launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 14, 2006.
She will be the fourth space tourist after US entrepreneur Dennis Tito, who traveled to the ISS in April 2001, South African Mark Shuttleworth in April 2002, and American Greg Olsen in October 2005.

Born in Yorkshire in 1952, Helen Dunmore studied English at York University and taught in Finland for two years before publishing her first book. She has worked as a writer, reader, performer and teacher of poetry and creative writing, tutoring residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and taking part in the Poetry Society’s Writer in Schools scheme. She has also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol’s Continuing Education Department and for the Open College of the Arts. She also reviews for The Times and The Observer, contributes to arts programs on BBC Radio and has been a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year award.
Her poetry collections include The Apple Fall (1983), The Sea Skater (1986), which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award in 1987, The Raw Garden (1988) and Short Days, Long Nights: New and Selected Poems (1991).
Her novels include Zennor in Darkness (1993), winner of the McKitterick Prize, a fictional account of D. H. Lawrence’s life in Cornwall during the First World War; the acclaimed A Spell of Winter (1995), about a brother and sister brought up by their grandfather in his decaying house in the country, winner of the first Orange Prize for Fiction; Talking to the Dead (1996), a tale of two sisters locked in an intense, obsessive relationship; Your Blue-Eyed Boy (1998), the story of a judge’s fight to take control of both her professional and personal lives; and With Your Crooked Heart (1999), a story of two brothers, set in contemporary London. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Love of Fat Men (1997) and Ice Cream (2000).
She has written a number of books for children, including Secrets (1994), which won the Signal Poetry Award, and the novels Brother, Brother, Sister, Sister (1999) and The Zillah Rebellion (2001).
Her recent novel for adults, The Siege (2001), shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, is set during the siege of Leningrad in 1941. Mourning Ruby (2003), is a story about memory, love and history.
Helen Dunmore is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest book is House of Orphans (2006), a historical novel set in Finland.

Disabled and war veteran women have grabbed all medals awarded to Iranian female athletes.

Physically challenged and war-disabled women have grabbed 10 percent of all medals won by Iranian athletes in international tournaments, president of the Iranian Sports Federation for the Disabled and War-Disabled told IRNA.
Highlighting that all medals won by Iranian female athletes have been conferred upon disabled and war veteran women, Mahmoud Khosravi Vafa said the group has gained several medals in Paralympics and other international contests.
He criticized the negligence toward women’s sports, insisting that the government promote the sector by providing credits and facilities.
He went on to say that women celebrate 30 percent of all world sports titles.
He emphasized that championship contests and provincial sports for women be promoted.
“Eighteen development and sporting projects for disabled and war-disabled women athletes would be inaugurated by the yearend (March 2007),“ Khosravi Vafa concluded.

More than 3,000 cooperatives will be set up for women by the yearend (March 21), as per a decision by the Ministry of Cooperatives.
According to IRNA, director general of the ministry’s office for programming, Nahid Mansouri, said these cooperatives will have in excess of 347,500 members and will provide job opportunities for 24,800 women.
Mansouri, who is also in charge of women cooperatives, added that more than 14,200 cooperatives have so far been established throughout the country.
“These cooperatives have more than 520,000 members and have created more than 262,000 jobs,“ she said.
The official further noted that 3.5 billion rials had been allocated to fund supportive programs, establish cooperatives for female graduates and encourage development projects by women.

A tribal woman from Bakhtiari clan in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari province (Photo by Reza Moattarian)

Calls by female riders prompted the company to reconsider the location of exclusive railcars.

The first and last cars in Tehran subways shall henceforth be exclusively reserved for women to ease their daily commutes.
Earlier, the first two cars of each subway train were used by female passengers. This created problems because the place of the wagons were changed every time the trains changed direction.
ISNA quoted deputy head of Tehran Metro Organization, Rabiei, as saying that the decision to change the place of women-exclusive cars was made due to repeated requests by female commuters.
Women wagons are marked in yellow to distinguish them from other railcars.
Overhead handrails of the railcars on both ends of the train will be equipped with rubber grab handles to help female riders with relatively shorter heights than men to keep their balance.

Center for Women and Family Affairs of the Presidential Office intends to provide women with free counseling and psychiatry services before they decide on divorce.
Presidential advisor and head of the center, Zahra Tabibzadeh Nouri, unveiled the decision in a talk to IWNA on the sidelines of the third national meeting of governor generals’ advisors on women’s affairs.
“Considering the fact that many family problems can be resolved with expert intervention, it is highly essential to benefit from the services of skilled therapists to assist the couples verging on divorce.“
The advisor insisted that legal counseling should not solely target women.
“Otherwise, women will keep on demanding rights which men will continue to deny,“ Tabibzadeh Nouri commented.
She said a plan aimed at empowering women has been worked out and is being enforced with the help of related organizations, expressing hope that the initiative would help alleviate the concerns of female breadwinners and working women.
Commenting on women’s managerial capabilities, she stated, “Men will not be able to exclude women from managerial spheres, provided specialist women make a stronger showing in different arenas.“
Tabibzadeh Nouri recommended that personal potentials and endeavors, rather than gender, be considered as the criteria for assessment of individuals.

Less educated women face a greater risk of developing heart disease, research from Sweden shows. This is largely because women with fewer years of schooling are more likely to have heart disease risk factors such as cigarette smoking, sedentary lifestyle, high body mass index, high blood pressure and diabetes, researchers report, Reuters said.
There is a well-established link between lower socioeconomic status and higher heart disease risk among men, the research team notes in the American Journal of Epidemiology. A number of causes have been proposed for the connection, including that less educated, poorer people may have unhealthier lifestyles or less access to medical care, or that they may face more on-the-job stress.
To investigate the relationship between social status and heart disease in women, Hannah Kuper of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK and colleagues analyzed data from a study of 49,259 women who ranged in age from 30 to 50 at the study’s outset in 1991-1992 and had been followed for an average 11 years.
Women with the least education were more than three times as likely as those with the most years of schooling to have a heart attack during the follow-up period, the researchers found. Nearly all of this relationship could be attributed to the higher prevalence of heart disease risk factors such as smoking and overweight among the less educated women.
The researchers also found a weak relationship between increased job stress and lower social support on the job and heart disease risk, but this relationship could not account for the heart disease-education link.
They conclude, “A health promotion campaign aimed at reducing the prevalence of established coronary risk factors such as smoking in lower educational groups may reduce the population incidence of coronary heart disease, although other correlates of low education need further investigation.“