Thirty-six universities in Iran have announced that 77 courses in their curriculum will be “single-sex,” prompting an outcry at home and worldwide over women’s rights in the Islamic state.

­The subjects now only available for men include accounting, engineering, pure chemistry, English literature and translation, hotel management, and many others, Iranian news website Rooz Online reports. For instance, the University of Tehran will now open exclusively to men the courses related to mathematics, natural resources, and forestry.

The announcement comes a fortnight after the move was reported by the semi-official Mehr News Agency, but back then the decision has not been officially confirmed by educational institutions.

The limitations have been listed in the universities’ leaflets. The changes are to be implemented in the coming year, the Telegraph reports.

Exiled Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi has urged the UN to immediately investigate the matter, calling the move an attempt to derail Iranian women’s fight for their rights.

“[It] is part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena,” Ebadi wrote in her letter to Ahmad Shaheed, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Iran.

The controversial move has also led to Iranian parliamentarians calling the Science and Higher Education Minister Kamran Daneshjoo to explain the decision.

The top education official brushed aside the criticism, saying that 90 per cent of degrees remain open to both sexes, and that single-sex courses were needed to create “balance”.

“Some fields are not very suitable for women’s nature,” another senior education official, Abolfazl Hasani, said.

The move comes amid reports that the country’s women have excelled over men greatly in recent years, causing senior Iranian clergy members to express their concern about the increasing academic success among women in the Islamic State.

According to UNESCO, Iran has highest ratio of female to male students in the world, with the country’s women outnumbering men three to two and making up about 60 per cent of all undergraduates.

The Swedish government will not extradite Assange to the US should he face the death penalty there, as any possible extradition request from Washington is then subject to strict conditions, an official from the country’s Justice Ministry declared.

­“We will never surrender a person to the death penalty,” the deputy director of the Service for Criminal Cases and International Cooperation of Sweden’s Justice Ministry said in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on Tuesday.

This means there should be strict guarantees from the US government that “the prisoner will not be executed in any case,” added Cecilia Riddselius. But, she added, so far her country has not received any extradition request from Washington.

In June, Cecilia Riddselius admitted there were opportunities for countries to request different types of guarantees in relation to extradition. Sweden may request that an extradited person will not be sentenced to the death penalty, he or she will not be tortured, should not be prosecuted for offences other than those which he or she was delivered for and not to be charged before a special court.

However, Riddselius then stressed, Sweden cannot guarantee in advance that Assange will not be extradited.

Read the whole story…

Rosie O’Donnell says she suffered a heart attack last week, but survived it by taking an aspirin.

The 50-year-old comedian said her symptoms occurred last Tuesday, hours after she helped pull an “enormous woman struggling to get out of her car.” Blogging about the experience in verse Monday, O’Donnell wrote:

“my body hurt,I had an ache in my chest, both my arms were sore, everything felt bruised.”

The pain continued, O’Donnell said, and she felt nauseous. Her skin became clammy and she felt hot and threw up. She searched for heart attack symptoms online and found that she had several of them. She wrote:

“I took some bayer aspirin, thank god,saved by a tv commercial,literally.”

Doctors believe aspirin can in certain cases help prevent blood clots that block blood vessels and cause heart attacks. People should consult a doctor before deciding whether to regularly take aspirin to reduce the risk of heart attack.

When O’Donnell went to a cardiologist the day after experiencing the symptoms, she was told that she had a 99 percent blockage. She received a stent.

“they call this type of heart attack,the Widow maker, I am lucky to be here,” O’Donnell wrote.

O’Donnell urged women to know the symptoms of a heart attack, and to do what she didn’t — call 911 — if they experience them.