In 2004, I did a story for PBS about female voters and what they were concerned about. It wasn’t abortion, or family values, or even education. All the old chestnuts didn’t even come close to the troubling issue of the economy. These women, many of whom had retired parents and kids about to go to college, worried about how they were going to do it all. The news just got worse for them. We all know women, on average, out-live men. Well, now we know that women are also out-living their retirement accounts. At a time when the country is going to start grappling with what entitlements really mean–and what should be cut–let’s take a quick look at this item from the Springfield News-Sun:

Since women tend to live more years in retirement than men, they have a greater chance of exhausting all sources of income except Social Security, said Doug Nguyen, the Social Security Administration’s deputy regional communications director for six states, including Ohio.

In Ohio, Social Security dramatically reduces poverty rates for women 65 and older from 53 to 10 percent, according to the National Women’s Law Center. The poverty rate for male senior citizens is 6 percent in Ohio, but it would be 44 percent without the program.

And then, there’s this: “Hounsell, with the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement, said many women do not financially prepare for retirement, but even those who do often only save in expectation of living to 80 or 85. She said this means they run the risk of going broke when they live into their 90s or beyond. ‘Women live longer and have chronic illnesses that are far more expensive,’ she said.”

The fact is, Social Security needs to be, and will be, revamped–along with other entitlement programs. Meanwhile, Jezebel suggests taking a few moments to figure out how much you need to save for retirement with this handy financial calculator. I found out that I need to save nearly $2 million (you may have heard the scream as I nearly fell off my chair), which certainly takes the appeal out of entrepreneurship.

–Michele Mitchell

From initiating the Bushehr nuclear power plant to unveiling a new surface-to-surface missile, Iran has been defiantly flexing its muscles in the face of international sanctions. Meanwhile, the government has continued cracking down on political dissidents and even introduced tougher laws on advertisements about house pets. Learn more about these and other issues in The Week in Review, an ongoing series about Iran’s Green Movement, comprised largely of footage shot on cell phones and small cameras and smuggled out of the country.

In the past week, there have been signs of rifts among Iran’s ruling elite. In particular, Iran’s Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Ayatollah Komeini said Iran will not sit down for talks with the US until sanctions are lifted, directly contradicting President Ahmadinejad. Learn more about this and other Green Movement issues in this episode of “The Week in Green.”

With international sanctions mounting and oil sales falling, Iran plans to switch its reserve currencies from dollars and Euros to the Iranian Rial. Iran’s first vice president said the country would no longer trade oil in these “filthy” currencies. Along with a hunger strike, religious persecution and more evidence about 2009′s rigs presidential election, this episode of “The Week in Green” charts Iran’s political unrest.

Fasting political prisoners, street protests, a ban on music – these are just some of the stories happening in this week in Iran. This episode of “The Week in Green” examines Iran’s political tensions and the Green Movement’s continuing activities.

Children’s music and merchandise is supposed to be recession proof, but this economic crisis has hit even the kids’ pockets (or at least their parents’). We caught up with Lloyd Miller to see how business is going for his popular Brooklyn-based children’s rock group, The Deedle Deedle Dees.

If there’s one industry more worried than newspapers these days, it’s the book publishers. At South-By-Southwest last year, we were told, publishing executives asked the public what they should be doing. One author decided to answer the question herself.

Brenda Cullerton, who has worked with the big guys like Little, Brown, self-published her new novel “The Craigslist Murders,” and in two weeks it sold 700 copies – a good start, no matter who is publishing it.

Below, hear about Brenda’s adventures in self-publishing in the latest episode of “Little Green Shoots.” Also, check out her blog “Brenda and the F Word” here.

We’re debuting our new economic program, “Little Green Shoots,” today. When we read the statement by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that he was starting to see “green shoots” in the economy, and we wondered, where? Instead of asking another politician or an economist, we decided to go to the people who would really know: the small business owner.

After all, small business owners are lauded by Congress as the “backbone of America,” and they’re also the ones bearing the brunt of the recession.

First up is Dennis Hof, owner of the Bunny Ranch brothel in Carson City, Nevada.

New Yorkers pay more tax for cigarettes than anywhere else in the US. So, are they buying more or less in the economic downturn? We headed to the city’s Lower East Side neighborhood to learn more about people’s smoking habits. Check out the results in the latest episode of “Little Green Shoots”.

The Taliban in 2001 was famously suspicious of television cameras. The Taliban of 2009? They have press secretaries, one of whom—described as the “chief spokesman of the Taliban in Swat” was recently arrested.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, has a magazine empire. The al-Qaeda of 2001 now has splintered into various divisions, and each one has its own media outreach, according to Gregory Johnsen, a former Fulbright Fellow in Yemen and currently a PhD candidate at Princeton. He tracks Yemen on the blog Waq al-Waq but points out that even al-Shabaab in Somalia has media productions and spokesmen.

Johnsen translated the latest issue (the 11th) of Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battles). The magazine is published online by the recently merged al-Qaeda in Yemen and al-Qaeda Arabian Penninsula.

But who did the cover shoot?

Now, you might be asking yourself, “What would be in such a magazine?” Sure, the cover features a grenade in the background and a beaker filled with liquid in front of it. But there are publication staples like a front-of-the-magazine piece (this one by the leader of AQY/AQAP, Nasir al-Wahayshi), congratulatory notices (for weddings and suicide bombs) and a women’s column (describing how to support your jihad man). There’s no advertising, like we would think of, although there is an editorial e-mail.

But primarily the magazine is concerned with theological and legal reasons to explain AQ’s actions. “They have their target market,” Johnsen says, “mostly in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. And they’ve done a very good job in Yemen creating a narrative.”

According to Johnsen, the magazine is most useful as a gauge for what’s happening within the organization. And the article that struck Johnsen most was an anti-Shia screed (“The Apostates: Stages of Confrontation”) by a former Guantanamo Bay detainee named Ibrahim al-Rubaysh.

“Yemen and Saudi Arabia are very different,” Johnsen says. “Anti-Shia [writings] are not common in Yemen, and a growing anti-Shia rhetoric suggests a much more Saudi influence. Whether this means the beginning of a trend or it’s a one-off is impossible to tell.”

But something to watch, especially as Yemen teeters on.

–Michele Mitchell