Because I am foreign I was assigned to the foreign desk. I kid you not, it's true.

More times than I care to remember I have sympathized with too many of them assigned like myself, to some of the world's royal bad places.

We hear foreign accents on CNN. It's crazy, it's wild, who knows, maybe they'll take you because you certainly don't fit in, in the American spectrum of news.

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children.

In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press.

Sadly, marriage and motherhood have coincided with the demise of journalism as I knew it and I dreamt that it would always be.