On Wednesday, August 20, Stephanie Tubbs Jones (Democratic Representative from Ohio) suffered a burst aneurysm while driving in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

She was rushed to the hospital where doctors said that the aneurysm was located in “an inaccessible part of her brain” and she had “very limited brain activity.”

She was pronounced dead at 6:12 pm.  She was 58 years old.

One summer afternoon about 4 years ago, I got a phone call at work.

It was my husband. 

(more…)

An, umh, slightly unorthodox way of finding yourself a woman:

Marina Nemat’s name had been scrawled on her forehead, and she was about to be shot.

She had been locked up in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since early 1982, when, at age 16, she complained that math and history lessons in her school had been replaced by Koran instruction and political propaganda.

Nemat was rounded up for speaking out against the Ayatollah Khomeini’s brutal regime, and she was sent to Evin to be interrogated, tortured and executed.

Just minutes from death, her life was spared. But the blessing came with a heavy price.

A prison guard named Ali had fallen in love with Nemat and used his father’s connection to the Ayatollah to commute her sentence to life in prison. Threatening to harm her family and friends, he forced Nemat — a Christian — to marry him and convert to Islam.

She wrote a book about her experiences called Prisoner of Tehran; NPR has an excerpt of the book (which I will get for myself). If you want to read it as well, you can order it at Amazon.