Space Tourist Anousheh Ansari Transfixes, Befuddles Iran

Last month, Iranian-American businesswoman Anousheh Ansari spent in the neighborhood of $20 million to hop a ride aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to become the first female space tourist. Folks in the land of her birth were obsessed with Ansari’s trip, according to Nazila Fathi’s New York Times story. The journey stimulated much debate about the plight of women in Iran and whether Ansari’s money might have been better spent helping out the country’s poor.

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