Iran Rising disparities in Urban & rural economyMonday, 19 November 2007, : Morteza Aminmansour
The government of Iran should:
Minimize the degree of urban subsidy and expand the scope of recipients to rural population.
Promote better access for the unemployed to the labor market and jobs.
Create jobs by investing in service and technology oriented industries as they continue to reform.
Provide training and education for the labor force.
Remove discrimination against women in education and employment.
Adopt preferential treatment for foreign investment in inland areas.
The Iranian government should practice a policy of buying agricultural products at higher prices and selling industrial products to farmers at lower prices. Consequently they can earn enough to support their families through the year.
Iranian government is proposing to financially subsidize grain production to increase farmers’ incomes. It is to believe that this policy may not be suitable for economic development in the long run. But the government should reform the investment policy that is putting rural economic development at a disadvantage and should invest vigorously in rural education.
While regional imbalances and socio-economic disparities have persisted in Iran over the last decades of planned economic development, it should be a matter of particular concern to policy-makers that these same policies been the couse that have tended to widen these imbalances at an alarming rate.
Accelerating national growth, reducing poverty, and achieving national social targets will not be possible without strengthening the performance of, and access to, services in these disadvantage provinces, sectors and communities.
Implementation of reforms is essential to reduce fiscal imbalances and improve the composition of public expenditure and investment climate.
Of particular importance for poverty reduction and increasing rural incomes are policies aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and rural employment.
Iranian government should create a Rural Entrepreneurs and Micro enterprise Program that would allow rural entrepreneurs to acquire the skills, obtain capital, and build networks necessary to establish new small businesses in rural areas and receive continuing technical assistance as the individuals begin operating the small business.
Micro enterprise would be defined in the program as a business that employs five or fewer individuals, creating a Community Entrepreneurial Development Program based on four pillars of rural economic and community development: entrepreneurship, capital, youth, and leadership.
This program should offer grants to collaborating communities to establish regional initiatives for entrepreneurial development, including small business education and technical assistance, leadership, development, youth attraction and retention, and inter- generational business transfer planning.
Read the full article here : http://preview.tinyurl.com/2nrslw
Instead of all the above - this is what they do - and that is to their loyal opposition, let alone what they do to their unfriendly oppositions!
Iran sentences labour leader to five years imprisonment
Mansoor Osanloo, leader of the Tehran bus drivers union, who has been imprisoned for months after being kidnapped on the street by police has just been sentenced by Iran's judiciary. An Iranian court has sentenced a dissident labor leader to five years in jail, a judiciary official was quoted as saying on Wednesday.
Mansoor Osanloo, who runs a union grouping bus drivers, was detained in July for "distributing statements against the system". Western rights groups say Iran has launched a crackdown on dissenting voices, although Tehran denies this. "This verdict is certain and he is currently serving his jail sentence," Hassan Haddad, deputy prosecutor in Tehran, was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency, without giving details of the charges. Iran's judiciary says Osanloo's union is an illegal organization.Haddad was quoted as saying about the case in August: "I told Osanloo 'your behavior creates problems for the country's security' ... Because he has traveled abroad he thinks he can do whatever he wants." Rights groups and Western governments say Iran this year has launched a fresh crackdown on dissent in the Islamic Republic, with the authorities targeting women's rights activists, students, journalists and labor figures. The European Union last week said it was "deeply concerned at the growing repression against all groups which exercise their right to freely express their opinions ... in the Islamic Republic." Iran rejects accusations it is violating human rights and the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says it supports free speech and welcomes constructive opposition.
IRAN: Journalist and Woman Activist, Maryam Hosseinkhah, Arrested
Maryam HossienkhahChange for Equality: November 18, 2007:
Maryam Hossienkhah, Journalist, member of the Women's Cultural Center, and an active member of the One Million Signatures Campaign was arrested earlier today. A few days after the site of the Women's Cultural Center, a leading women's NGO, was shut down on order of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Judiciary, Maryam Hosseinkhah, an editor of the site of this organization as well as one of the editors of the site of the One Million Signatures Campaign, Change for Equality, was summoned to the security branch of the Revolutionary Courts on Saturday 17th of November. She was interrogated for over 2 hours on Saturday and was told that she is charged with disruption of public opinion, propaganda against the state, and publication of lies through the publication of untrue news items on the site of the Women's Cultural Center and the One Million Signatures Campaign. Maryam Hosseinkhah was also ordered to return to the Revolutionary Courts for more interrogation today, Sunday November 18, 2007 at 9:00am. After arriving at Court today, an order of arrest of issued for Ms. Hosseinkhah, and to our disbelief she was arrested and transferred to Evin Prison at 2:00pm.
The arrest of Maryam Hosseinkhah marks the continuation of increased harassment of women's rights activists, especially members of the Campaign, by the Security forces. To date, over 40 individuals have been arrested in relation to their peaceful activities in support of the Campaign. Currently two other members of the Campaign besides Maryam remain in prison. Ronak Safarzadeh and Hana Abdi were both arrested in Kurdistan after collection of signatures. They remain in prison and have had not had access to their families or lawyers.
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything : By Roger Highfield, Science Editor : Last Updated:14/11/2007
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month." Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics. Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year. Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos. Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says. "Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph. "Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound." The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego. He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay. The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works. But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in." And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot." Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape." What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8. Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'" What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says. The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up. "The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction. "For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."
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