Dying seconds that will last for ever

by Cassandra Jardine The Daily Telegraph

05:55 AM Jun 26, 2009

Since finding its way onto the Web, the video of Neda's horrific death has opened the world's eyes to what's happening in Iran. AFP

THE death of a young woman on the streets of Tehran is caught on camera and viewed by millions. But should we be watching?

You tick the box saying you are over 18. You notice the warning that the material you are about to see could be upsetting. But nothing can prepare you for the horrible immediacy of watching a young woman die, as Neda Agha Soltan does on YouTube.

The moment you hit the "Play" button, you are pitched into the streets of Tehran, where a woman in jeans is lying on the ground while several men attempt to help her.

As the camera moves around the scene, away from her legs, past the striped T-shirt of a helper, we see the face of the 27-year-old philosophy student.

She is young and beautiful, but it is her eyes that are unforgettable. They stare at you with a look of animal panic, as blood begins to trickle out of her mouth.

The film lasts only 40 seconds, but it is enough to affect world opinion. Over the past few days, millions of people have sent links to each other, wanting to share the horror that brings home so vividly the violence which the Iranian authorities are meting out on innocent citizens.

United States President Barack Obama spoke about the clip: "We have seen courageous women stand up to brutality and threats, and we have experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets. While this loss is raw and painful, we also know this: Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history."

In years to come, the bloodied face of Neda - already called the Angel of Freedom - will be the image that lingers of the Iran uprising, just as the naked, napalmed girl running down the road has come to encapsulate the Vietnam War.

Neda never set out to be a martyr: Her boyfriend has said that she was with her music teacher when she briefly stepped out of the car, only to become caught up in history. Yet, she is already on her way to becoming Iran's Joan of Arc.

These images, as the great war photographer Don McCullin has said, are our modern version of religious icons.

The footage of Neda's death certainly has the ring of truth about it: The panic-stricken voices, the blood that spread with shocking speed over her face (as it would since she had been shot in the heart) and the testimonials of relatives. This looks like an image that we can trust. But should we be looking at it at all?

Generally, the British media steer clear of such shocking images because they contravene one of our last taboos - that the moment of death is private and should be witnessed only by those who care for that person. In the YouTube age, that principle is being eroded.

And yet, Mr Stuart Franklin, president of Magnum - a cooperative representing many war photographers - believes that there "is a difference between Neda's death and voyeurism. It's about drawing attention to an issue". He feels that images force change.

"I was in Tiananmen in 1989, when gory photographs of students were glued to lamp posts. It was the only way people could see what was going on. The photographs taken at the Heysel stadium (where 39 football supporters died in 1985) focused attention on inadequate design and police practice."

At the time there were protests about the Heysel publication. Upsetting as the results may be, the alternative is worse.

Many appalling atrocities of recent years have passed relatively unnoticed because there are no images to which the public can attach their outrage.

Repression in Burma and Tibet has been helped by the lack of reporting and filming. And who remembers the deaths of rioting Mexican students before the 1968 Olympics? Few, because no images exist.

What Neda's death does not do is shed any light on the nuances of the conflict. For that, words and thought are more reliable than pictures and emotion.

From TODAY, Comment – Friday, 26-Jun-2009; see the source article here.

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Tinker, tailor, soldier, banker

So much money, so little time for family — why you should think twice before entering the finance sector

David Leonhardt, xtra@mediacorp.com.sg

THE big influx of highly educated workers into finance in the last two decades has been the subject of some national hand-wringing in the United States lately. President Barack Obama, college presidents and economists have all worried aloud that Wall Street has hoarded human resources that might otherwise have gone to science, education, medicine or other fields.

Now, new research is suggesting that the shift also brought another cost — a cost that fell mainly on the people, especially women, who took jobs in finance. Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.

Finance, on this score, is worse than law and worse than academia. It is far worse than medicine, which emerges from the research as the highly-paid profession with the most flexibility. Near finance at the bottom of the list is consulting, another field that became more popular in the last two decades.

The research, by Professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, answers a question that college students, for all their careful career planning, rarely consider: Which jobs offer the best chance at balancing work and family life? A decade or two after college, however, that question often comes to dominate conversations among friends and between spouses.

On almost every aspect of work-life balance, finance and consulting look pretty bad. People who take time off in those fields suffer large penalties, both in terms of money and career opportunities, once they return to full-time work. And part-time jobs are hard to come by, which often forces people to make a choice between working a 70-hour week and leaving a job entirely.

One set of statistics neatly summarises the findings. After surveying Harvard College alumni 15 years after graduation, Goldin and Katz estimated the average financial penalty for someone who had taken a year and a half off and then returned to work. In medicine, that person earned 16 per cent less than a similar doctor who had not taken time off. Among people with no graduate degree, the gap was 25 per cent. For both lawyers and PhDs, it was about 29 per cent.

For MBA's, a group dominated by finance workers and consultants, it was 41 per cent. Given how much money many make, they can probably do just fine even after such a pay cut. Yet the size of it suggests that time off puts them on a completely different career track.

"The good news is that there are at least some professions where women have been able to carve out a set of policies that are compatible with family life," Columbia professor Jane Waldfogel, who studies families, told me. "The challenge for the next generation — and it isn't just about women — is to extend this to other occupations."

Professors Goldin and Katz, who are two of the country's leading labour economists and have published the crux of these findings in the American Economic Review, studied Harvard graduates from the last 40 years. That allowed them to compare a fairly similar group of students over a long period, but had the disadvantage of creating a decidedly atypical survey group.

So the two economists compared their results to two other surveys — the National Survey of College Graduates, run by the National Science Foundation, and a study of University of Chicago business school graduates — and found broadly consistent patterns.

According to the most recent National Survey, for instance, 21 per cent of doctors in their late 30s and early 40s work less than 35 hours a week. The share was roughly 14 per cent for MBA graduates, as it was for lawyers and people with PhDs.

The idea that medicine offers more choices than other elite professions may come as a surprise, given that medical training requires notoriously long hours of study. But once doctors reach their 30s, many of them seem to be rewarded with a wider set of options than their counterparts in other fields.

Also, in medicine, group practices are now the norm, and the doctors take turns being on call. A family's primary obstetrician isn't guaranteed to be the one who delivers the baby. In many practices, every doctor will see a woman at least once during her pregnancy, so that she knows everyone who may deliver her baby.

Wall Street, consulting firms and law firms have resisted this group approach to work. The partners claim the work is too complicated to be handed from one employee to another. In some cases, that's no doubt true. Often, though, I bet it isn't. "Why are women's bodies less complicated than someone's account?" Goldin wryly asks.

The general resistance to group work — and to flexibility — instead seems to stem from old habits, much as obstetricians once would have scoffed at the notion of a group practice. The downsides of allowing people to share work would probably be outweighed by the benefits of being able to hire talented people who want satisfying careers and aren't willing to work 70-hour weeks.

For now, that group remains largely female. But there is some reason to hope that fathers will be increasingly drawn to such jobs as well. Over the last four decades, according to the economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, men have increased the average amount of time they spend taking care of children.

The question of how to balance work and family is almost inevitably a thorny one. Easy answers, free of compromise and sacrifice, are rare, especially for people who don't earn nearly as much money as doctors.

But if you're a teenager or college student trying to decide what to do with your life, you at least may want to start thinking about the question. I promise: Most of you will spend a lot of time thinking about it later. THE NEW YORK TIMES

WEEKENDXTRA

From TODAYOnline.com; see the source article here.

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