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When I was a child, we had to live in our grandmother's house. My mother, a lone parent, couldn't get a mortgage simply because she was a woman, even though she had a well-paid job. When I qualified as a lawyer in the U.K. three decades ago, women in the legal profession still had to overcome open prejudice and discrimination. So when we examine the position of women across the Middle East, it's important not to despair - or forget our own past...
...women have been appointed to important ministerial posts in neighboring countries; Jordan has four women in its Cabinet, including Hala Latouf, the Minister for Social Development. There are women judges, too, in Palestine, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates - something that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago. And women are taking an increasingly prominent role in the economy; in the West Bank recently I met female lawyers, architects and even a lift engineer. Of course, we can't get carried away. In some Middle Eastern countries, the progress of women can appear desperately slow. And in none...
...made sense, except for one tiny problem: this same model also suggested that a little world like Earth shouldn't exist at all; it (or more precisely, the moon-size proto-planets that eventually assembled into Earth) should have spiraled into the sun more than 4 billion years ago. A star might not gobble a Jupiter whole when it moves close enough, but it could surely swallow a canapé like proto-Earth...
...would guarantee that the state would spend no less than 10% of its general fund on public universities and no more than 7% on state prisons. In his State of the State address, he declared that the state's future economic well-being is dependent on education. "Thirty years ago, 10% of the general fund went to higher education and 3% to prisons," he said. "Today almost 11% goes to prisons and only 7.5% goes to higher education. What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns?" (Read a 2003 profile...
...vital it is to return the University of California and the California state university system to solid financial footing." But state senate Democratic leader Darrell Steinberg's assessment of Schwarzenegger's dedication to higher ed was less than glowing: "It would have been even a better speech six years ago, because during the governor's tenure, prison spending has increased 32% and higher education has declined 9%." (See protests against tuition hikes in California and other places...